THE NEW MINISTER.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 February 1921, Page 5

THE NEW MINISTER.

KEEN STUDENT OF ECONOMICS. RE-ARRANGING PORTFOLIOS. The appointment of Mr. William Downie Stewart, member for Dunedin West, to the Ministry, was announced briefly in yesterday’s Daily News. Mr. Stewart is to take the portfolio of Internal Affairs, held at present by the Hon. G. J. Anderson, and also one other portfolio yet to be determined. Mr. Andenson will retain the portfolio of Labor, which he took over when Sir William Herries left New Zealand early in the month, and will be allotted a second portfolio. The Departments at present without Ministerial heads include Customs and Marine.

Some re-arrangement of portfolios will be made necessary by the absence of the Prime Minister during his impending visit to Britain. It has been indicated already that Mr Massey will hand over Finance to Sir Francis Bell (AttorneyGeneral), who is to be Acting-Prime Minister. The portfolio of Railways will go to one of the other Ministers.

Mr. Downie Stewart will not be sworn in until next week. The GovernorGeneral is at present in Auckland. Mr. Stewart will take up his Ministerial duties early next month.

The new Minister is the younger son of the late W, Downie Stewart, formerly a well-known figure in the New Zealand Parliament. He represents the constituency that sent his father to Parliament. Mr, Stewart was born in Dunedin in 1878, and was educated at the Otago Boys’ High School and Dunedin University, where he graduated LL.B. ip 1900. He began the practice of law in Dunedin in the same year. He unsuccessfully contested Dunedin South against Mr. J. F. Arnold in 1900. He was a member of the Dunedin City Council from 1907 to 1913, and in the latter year became Mayor of the city. He won Dunedin West at the general election of 1914, and in the following year he paired with Mr. T. E. Y. Seddon (Westland) in order that he and Mr. Seddon might go to the front with the Expeditionary Force. The two young members gained eopimissions in the training camps before they left New Zealand, and they both saw service in France. Mr. Stewart was invalided back to New Zealand in a crippled condition owing to a serious rheumatic affection, and he has not recovered fully the use of his limbs. His partially crippled condition, however, has not prevented him taking an active part in the proceedings of Parliament, where he has shown himself a forceful and wellinformed debater.

Mr. Downie Stewart is an authority on New Zealand’s social and industrial legislation, and is a keen, student of economics. He was the joint-author, with Professor le Rossignol, of “State Socialism in New Zealand,” which was published in England and America in 1910, and has been widely read and quoted as an impartial and able study of New Zealand conditions. He has been a member of the Otago University