WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Hokitika Guardian, 3 November 1920, Page 1

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

THE EXPIRING SESSION. " homesick “legislators . (Our Special Correspondent). WELLINGTON, November i. A si>£tv-SCven per. cent, to their salaries and material additions to their perquisites have not made ; the members of the House of Representatives any more anxious to prolong, session when they and their, predecessors were in the days when they received only a beggarly £3OO a year an enjoyed a free railway pass,... routed fares, cheap telegraph rate?, .exemption from postage and a number of other insignificant privileges. Just . now, indeed Wellington is. witnessing the m'ost unseemly >. Scramble foi i; home among the country’s legislators tlio oldest habitue of Parliament can recollect. The House, practically, has given j; o Prime. Minister carte blanch,® to put through what measures he pleases and new laws are being turned.out*as rapidlv as the handle of the parliamentary machine can be moved 'round.. The blame for any untoward, happenings from, this indecent haste of course will be laid at the door, of Mr. Massey, but it will be fair, to remember that without th ( > connivance of members, fhis method of doing business would he lm-

railways Aid. concentration. While, tlie Public Works Statement and Estimates were under discussion in the House of Reps on Friday night and Saturday morning the Minister of Railways was chided .unmercifully by. a number of members upon his (enunciation of the policy of concentration in construction lie had announced when lie first assumed office. He was .lot go T ing to 'fritter money away on scraps 'of"railway all over- the country,, he bad declared, reiterating a pious resolution practically every one of Ins predecessors bad uttered in the days of liis official youth. He, in spite of all temptation to the contrary, was.going to concentrate expenditure upon the , more important . and urgent lines and. so sweep away all the waste and inefficiency of th e past. It was an admirable scheme and it received the praise it deserved. Rut alack .and alas, tho Public Works Statement came out and there was no provision for concentration at all. ry-And'-by.

Bub Mr Coates indignantly denied that h c had renounced his good ievolutions. He was determined as he ever had been to put a stop to a practice wliich added enormously to the cost of the railways and seriously delayed the systematic development of the country. He could not, however,. step into office a.id by a single stroke of the pen revolutionise a -system that had been going for years. The circumstances of every line had to be considered. But honourable members might rest assured he would put his policy into operation at the earliest possible moment.and lie Imped he would have their assistance in carrying it out. .This, explanation seems plausible and reasonable enoughand Mr Coates’s next Public Works Statement will be awaited,with much curiosity and interest. Meanwhile die remaining criticism cefttres chiefly around the Minister’s apparent preference for lines serving the .Auckland province.

THE JOSIAH HOWARD REQUEST. There is a fairly widespread feeling in the House that the Government is not dealing quite fairly with the Howard bequest. The committee which reported upon the petition of a, large number of Hawke’s Bay residents, urging that the bequest should not he employed in establishing a State farm outside their province, indicated that the prayer of the petitioners was in, keeping with what was known of the testator’s wishes in insisting upon applying the proceeds of the estate towards the cost of the agricultural college to be established at Weraroa, some sixty miles along the Main Trunk railway from Wellington. Probably from a purely utilitarian point of view the money will be - better employed here than it would be in Hawke’s Bay but it is felt by a number of disinterested members of the House that the late Mr Howard’s deliberate intention should be the, first consideration. It seems to them that in a case of this kind the cold letter of the law shonld not he stretched to defeat the sentiment of a dead nian.