INTERVIEW WITH THE PREMIER.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 61, 5 December 1907, Page 2

INTERVIEW WITH THE PREMIER.

Per Tress Association. Auckland, Last Night. During the course of an interview tliis afternoon upon the subject of the Native Land legislation passed at the close of last session, the Premier referred to suggestions made that this and similar legislation had proceeded by the process commonly known as legislation by exhaustion. "I am really surprised," he said, "at the attempt to raise the cry of legislation by exhaustion, bearing the meaning that the important measures of the session had been rushed through at the end of the session. No one with any sense of fairness can say that a system of legislation by exhaustion was adopted in connection with any measure placed upon the Statute Book last session. I believe that Parliament should never sit after midnight, and I should be only too glad to see that carried out. To enable that to be done means that instead of sitting three or four months we would require Parliament to sit for six months every year, and I recognise that that would be very inconvenient for a great majority of the members, none of whom, so far as I am aware, belong to the leisured class. They all have private interests to attend to, and would thus be inconvenienced; but the only clear solution of the difficulty of preventing any accumulation of work at the close of the session is to make an earlier start and sit to a later date."