PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 805, 28 October 1929, Page 8

PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT

Sir,— Such delightful language we have been hearing from Parliament lately. If ever there was an institution of people with the temperament and the manners of badly-trained schoolboys, it is to be found within the Parliamentary Grounds, Wellington, where lessons in political twisting are to be learned every day in the week. The increase in the primage duty seems to cut no ice whatever with the Reform Party. It is true that the farmers’ super-tax was unsoundly based, and the Opposition was justified in attacking it fundamentally. But the part which disgusts me Is that as soon as a concession is made by the Government on the question of the super-tax, the Reform Party is willing to let the whole Bill go through together with its sister measure which embraces a purely revenue-grabbing tax from the breakfast table of the worker and the middle-class man. The Labour Party is one degree worse, because it has sacrificed everything It had in the way of principle, and has, at any cost, to retain its place by hanging to the coat-tails of the Government. Strange, indeed, that Labour did not make any protest against the primage duty by a spirited stand in the House; stranger still that

Labour, which asks always that taxation should be upon income, should support the Government's tax upon capital. And the Labour Leader, who has led some of the most prominent stonewall debates in the New Zealand Parliament, now has the audacity to cloak himself in political purity and castigate the Reform Party for holding up the business, and, further, to state that his party has never wasted the time of Parliament. The United Party is the worst of the buneh, sir because it is the cause of this trouble, by the fundamentally unsound nature of its taxation. Politics, sir, are rotten to their foundations.