MUCH PARLIAMENT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 70, 1 July 1910, Page 4

MUCH PARLIAMENT.

In all Parliaments only a few members effect any veal purpose. There is generally a dearth of gem and a great deal of setting. The members reflect the people ■who send, them to Parliament.' New Zealand has a tiny population and a large Parliament. If the population were ten times as great, it would be unnecessary to have a larger number of representatives. If this theory were acceptable, it would be just to divide the number of members 'by ten now. | Throughout Australasia, as we pointed out a short time ago, polities has become a very large business. It could not be a larger business if Australasia was peopled like Asia. The ordinary employer does not set three men to do one man's work, but the States set ten men to talk while one or two do the work. To be quite candid, the average member of Parliament is not expected to be - anything 'but a voting machine, and is by no means a cog in the wheel of government. If it is impossible for him to be of any Service, he should be eliminated. Every member c;f Parliament is quite certain that his strenuous work is killing him. He turns to his- ' tory, and finds that the Pitts and the Brights and the Gladstones and the Disraelis overworked themselves, and cries out in/"his agony for shorter hours in the House. If you will take the trouble to 190k. into Parliament House at any timej when Parliament is sitting you will jfind—to use an Irishism—that it is not .Jtiere. 'Members of Parliament are free agents, and need not work overtime. \lf members of Parliament die

young it is not as a result of oversitting. The House does not sit all the year it is quite unusual to find more thanks, third of the members in their seats at " any time. If a third of the members can transact the business of the country at any'given time, it seems reasonable that they could transact it at all times. At present all the colonies make a portentous display of legislative machinery for results that could be achieved by sma]}> boards of quiet men who had no use for full galleries or attentive scribes. And tie large Parliament of a small country is ■but a tiny section of the massive machinery that effects the results that make us so proud.