The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE THURSDAY, JULY 19 1917. THE POLITICAL DRIFT.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 19 July 1917, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

THURSDAY, JULY 19 1917. THE POLITICAL DRIFT.

(With which is incorporated The Taihape Post and Waimarino News).

The debate in Parliament on the Address-in-Reply, so far as it has

■gone, reveals quite a new aspect in politics, being different from all previous debates of the kind, inasmuch as from their speeches very nearly every Member seems to be opposed to the Government. Whether it be labour, liberal, reform, or independent, not one gives undivided support, but most have spoken in scathing terms of one serious delinquency or another. If what every one says is true, then there are some members of the Cabinet most distinctly out of their natural element. Of course, it is what would naturally result from a self-appointed body, which has the power to prolong its life indefinitely at will, in the name of the war. It is a chameleon-like coterie, being all colours to all people in the country, but not so in the House where it is ruling with a rod of iron, we might say with the mailed fist of a Kaiser. There is a degree of imperiousness pervading the Cabinet hitherto' unknown in this country, which is not working out in the best interests of the people and Members are chafing under it and resenting it. The House is telling the Government that if it will persist in its arrogance and indifference to what Members have a right to know Parliament will fake steps to compel it, But Ministers are assessing such threats at their true value. They know Members have a right to have their questions answered in a straight-forward, honest way, they know Members are anxious to obtain information on most important aspects of policy and administration, but Ministers also know that Members are much more anxious to retain their seats and the emoluments therefrom rather than risk them in a general election, and so matters will drift on from bad to worse until the constituencies prod representatives up to a higher sense of duty. Members boldly state that the Government are no longer political leaders, and that it is the clamour of the people that is leading the Government and there it ends. Ministers hold the bogey of a general election and Members recoil into the cushioned chairs they have so long occupied and which they are so reluctant to leave. It is common knowledge that Cabinet Is not a happy family; species of the felis order snap and snarl at the rodents; quarrels are frequent and bitter, but those having the upper hand know -how puerile such attempts at fractiousness become when the throat of an appeal to the constituenI cies is 'dangled well in sight. The mention of a general election soon straightens the fur and takes all the I stiffness out of any little backbone ( that is displayed. We have read somewhere of a human giant who

possessed ninety pounds of backbone; if toere could be discovered,, half that weight of backbone in the National Government there would be some cause for hope, but search the Cabinet room as one will, the backbone is non est; its place is filled with its equivalent weight in jelly, a jelly of varying colourlessness, distastefulness and incompatiblehess. To no section of the House is it acceptable. Reform is as scathing in its condemnation as is liberalism and labour, and yet this unprecedented position is to continue until those Directors of the common weal or woe have accomplished their aims, or are satisfied that they cannot control those under them without putting into force the threat of a consultation of constituencies which they have hitherto used so effectually. Ministers in the National Government are no longer responsible to their constituencies, and they have, in consequence, drifted away from the purpose for which they were elected. When they were given the public confidence they understood quite well it would be their duty to administer the laws they found on the Statute Book, and that in the evolution of new laws, they would stand for equality of right before and under any law that might come under discussion. What do we find since Cabinet has become its own lifegiver? Ministers blatantly talk down statute law and become a law unto themselves. Laws have been made by statesmen to prevent oppression and to provide means of relief in cases it was foreseen might, arise, but the self-appointed Ministers of to-day pooh-pooh the provisions of statute law and substitute their petty fads in place thereof. Permissable provisions of Acts of Parliament that have been used to free mep from loss and hardship for the last twenty or thirty years are not available now. Our political bombasts are not going to allow any such pampering of any section of the community, and we can have no better instance than that which occurred last week when men from this district waited on the Hdh. G. W. Russell with' a view to removing a very serious disability under which their district was suffering. For thirty years men in less severe circumstances Have been allowed to avail themselves of the law as it stands, but the Minister virtually told these men that the law was an “ass;” the statesmen and parliaments that evolved them were fools, and he would not permit them to be used in the present enlightened days*, land Ofe suffering settlers were sent away with the understanding that they must still go on rating themselves to enrich another local body from which they could get nothing in return. We never had such highly deyelopea brain power in Parliament as we have to-day, and settlers must understand that they will have to pay for it, not only by stupidly unjust taxation levies, but also from the practice of the fads of legislative and administration geniuses.