The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1927. A POLITICAL JORUM

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 197, 9 November 1927, Page 10

The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1927. A POLITICAL JORUM

THERE is nothing ill the Licensing Act Amendment Bill to compel or even to persuade the Liquor Trade to reform itself from within in order to justify its existence and disperse the widespread belief that it is a pernicious luxury. The necessity for a redistribution of licences, for the elimination of bad liquor, for the abolition of squalid drinking dens has been ignored. Such is the outstanding defect of the fantastic legislative proposals as introduced in the House of Representatives last evening by the Prime Minister without, of course, any reference to Cabinet, without any Government responsibility or policy. Someone in parliamentary authority had to sponsor the freak, and the Rt. Hon. J. G. Coates undertook the thankless task. Naturally and wisely, the chief administrator took infinite pains to make it perfectly clear that the Bill was in no sense a Government measure, that his colleagues and supporters in the House were quite unfettered as to determining its fate, and that the thing itself was merely a device for giving Parliament “a lead upon questions which occupy the foremost plane in the minds of those who study our social and economic life. It cannot he pretended that the initial work has been well done. The Bill is a curious, as well as a characteristic, mixture of compromise, concession, imposition, evasion and exaspeiating political shuffling. Like most of the major legislative measures which have marked and marred the course of Parliament for some time, the latest attempt to mould the Licensing Act into permanently acceptable form represents a weak desire to run away from main issues, instead of running at them with determination to secure a definite finality. The tentative proposals in the Bill at least possess the distinction of pleasing nobody and displeasing everybody. Those who prayed for a straight-out contest between Prohibition and Continuance are offered their hearts’ desire, but the deletion of the pretentious State Control issue from the ballot paper involves a stiff concession by the prohibitionists. They must surrender the hare majority decision, and accept a 55 per cent, majority. Thus neither of the main contestants is pleased, while the lean party which shouts relatively unheeded for State control must either change its fancy or he disfranchised at the poll, through having nothing to vote for. Of course, the 55 per cent, majority is to cut botJi ways, but it is to be anticipated that the enemies of the trade in intoxicants will not be able to see over and beyond the mountain that Mr. Coates proposes to raise against them. Still, it is only right that, if the test is to he confined to one of two issues at the poll, the decision, either way, should voice the will of an impressive majority. It may he argued, of course, that the new majority test has been pitched too high, but most people will accept it as quite reasonable in the circumstances. Then, it is proposed to extend the interval between one licensing poll and another from three to six years. The object of this extension of tenure is to give publicans a better feeling of security, thus encouraging them to consider the necessity for improving their service to the public, instead of concentrating sordidly and occasionally shamelessly on the acquisition of big profits. This proposed reform will also fail to please. It would be more conducive to political peace and good hotel service, if the interval between polls were extended to nine years. Taking the Bill at its best, however, it has very little chance of securing parliamentary sanction this session. If any one had been invited to devise a legislative measure guaranteed to provoke contention and delay, no better device than Mr. Coates’s Bill could have been constructed.

CHAINS FOR STRING

TO those who have formed the opinion that Great Britain lias * been utilising immigration primarily as an opportunity for dumping her unemployed on the Dominions, the remarks of Mr. L. S. Amery, Secretary of State for the Dominions, in the course of a speech delivered at Canberra, will come as a comforting assurance. Britain, said Mr. Amery, was not seeking to solve her unemployment problem by thrusting it upon the Dominions in the form of migration. Britain’s unemployment was for Britain to solve, and she would do nothing to create unemployment in the Dominions. The gain she looked for was based on the belief . that the prosperity of the Dominions was Britain’s prosperity, and that her economic strength must be born from trade which came back invigorated, instead of being dissipated throughout the world. Along similar but more extended lines is the picture drawn by Sir Alfred Mond, who shows us a British Empire, with America’s conditions of free internal exchanges and a tariff against the rest of the world, producing more than the Americans ever dreamed of. Sir Alfred points out that the Empire has command of some of the world’s leading commodities, and is therefore in a position which ought to enable it to compel most favourable trading terms from other countries, providing that these resources are used unitedly and in the right way. He advocates the expenditure of much larger sums on settlement in the Dominions, holding that this would create purchasers in the Dominions for British goods and relieve the labour market in Great Britain. Here is a theory of Imperial statesmanship worthy of the most earnest attention of real statesmen—of men who can lift themselves out of the morass of parochialism and party politics and plan for the common good of Empire. “The time has come for the achievement of this ideal,” declared Sir Alfred Mond, and the “Financial Times,” a journal that combines vision with a sound realisation of values, declares, editorially, that since Britain cannot settle down as a self-supporting nation like Denmark, the practical man must turn to the Empire. “If,” says the “Financial Times,” “we had a union of Empire, such as exists between the different States of America, we should he the greatest market in the world, and self-supporting. We need chains where we have now only string.” The policy outlined is one which only requires ingenuity and endeavour to accomplish in the process of time. But, as Sir Alfred Mond says, now is the time to make a beginning. Where are the smiths who will forge the chains which must be substituted for the string.’