The Sun MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1927. ARBITRATION BILL FARCE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 219, 5 December 1927, Page 8

The Sun MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1927. ARBITRATION BILL FARCE

LIKE every other legislative proposal calling for the practice of statesmanship and, apparently, calling in vain, the Arbitration Act Amendment Bill has been surgically treated in order to save the Government’s pride from further bruises. A major operation was inevitably essential, but it would have been better for all concerned if the measure had been anaesthetised beyond recovery. What is left is merely an inanimate political pretence. The original Bill was so crude in construction and so provocative in its main purpose that neither the virile Opposition in the House of Representatives nor the country as a whole would accept it. In these circumstances the right place for the despised measure was the parliamentary wastepaper basket a bulging receptacle this season. But, as everybody knows, there is some affection even for the idiot child. The Government insisted on providing at least the semblance of a legislative sop for its most vehement rural critics, and succeeded in persuading the House to fool itself and the people with a make-believe Bill which is to be suspended like Mahomet’s coffin for about a year. It is difficult to understand the Government’s reason for perpetrating this legislative farce. The only visible argument, in support of queer tactics is the fact that the Government, having had so many of its latest reforms condemned, wanted to have something on the Statute Book that would enable it to assure the farmers from pre-election platforms next year, that it had tried to keep its pledge to set them free of industrial laws and entanglements. But if that be the reason, it will fail to convince the agricultural community. In the words of a sympathetic journalistic friend of the Reform Administration, the new measure will he “a polite fiction.” After much pleading on the part of Ministers, the House, on Saturday night agreed in kindness to pass an impracticable Bill. The old title was retained without alteration, but the rest of the original legislative proposals was cast away as rubbish, and replaced by a double-barrelled clause excluding the farming industry from the jurisdiction of the Arbitration Court and providing, in addition to the maintenance of existing awards, that the Court will not be able to deal in any way with the farming industry before September 1 next year. This slack compromise may or may not cause confusion in the interval. The politicians, as usual, did not go into the question of the influence of the silly measure on the current work of the Arbitration Court and the demands of unionists whose awards have expired or are about to expire. On anything that affects the farming industry, which is doing pretty well in spite of so-called industrial tyranny, the Court must mark time for ten months. In view of the obvious truth that neither the Government nor Parliament as a whole has displayed ability to recast the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act into practical form, it was wisdom, if still a confession of weakness, to make the legislative compromise depend on the holding of a conference during the recess for the purpose of devising a better system of industrial arbitration. Too many members of Parliament should not be appointed to the prospective conference. They have already demonstrated their hopeless incompetence. Their representation should be confined to the Minister of Labour, the Leader of the Labour Opposition, and one other member. Employers and organised workers should co-operate in goodwill to select a representative delegation with whom should be associated at least two expert economists.