WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1922, Page 3

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

PARLIAMENT RESUMES. A LENGTHY ORDER PAPER. (Special Correspondent.) Wellington, Jan. 11. The general opinion in the reoccupied lobbies is that the Session will be much longer and more controversial than it would have been but for the Christmas adjournment. While the Government was pushing business through the House at the middle of last month in the hope of reaching the end before the holiday.-, the great majority of the members were entirely compliant and ready to give Mr. Massey and his colleagues every possible assistance in doing so. But most of them have returned to work with an informal mandate from their constituents to do this, that or some other thing and to see Parliament completes its job before it prorogues. In these circumstances it is not at all unlikely the completion of the business of the Session will occupy a month or even more. The Estimates are not yet half through, the the Public Works Statement still has to be presented, the Government’s retrenchment scheme has to be considered, the hiachinery of the meat pool has to be provided and in addition tnere are a number of Bills that must be put through before members are released. RETRENCHMENT. Probably no other item on this formidable programme is attracting so much attention as is the Government’s retrenchment scheme. On the one hand there is a public insisting that the Government shall do something effective, and on the other an army of civil servants and its friends protesting that a substantial reduction in the cost of living must precede any interference with wages-salaries. The Government is in an extremely difficult dilemma. The pay of the Civil servants, speaking generally, is by no means extravagant and before the financial position became as acute as it is at the present time Mr. Massey implied very broadly that it would not be reviewed till the cost of living had fallen and then only in proportion to the fall. Whether or not there has been any fall at 'all is a question upon which the Government statistician and the representatives of the Civil Service are not agreed, but it is certain that prices are not down to a level at which the average clerk or railway worker could spare a large slice off his income without serious inconvenience. INTANGIBLE RESULTS.

Another feature of the scheme that is bound to provoke a good deal of comment from a House refreshed by its holiday and instigated by its impatient critics, is the intangibilty of many of the savings Mr. Massey claims to have effected already. A very considerable part of the two or three millions the Prime Minister has mentioned appear to be merely paper savings. The butter subsidy, for instance, expired by the effluxion of time and part of the wheat guarantee became unnecessary, and yet these inevitable happenings were forthwith numbered among the economies effected by the Government in discharge of its undertaking to live within its income. Of course they were nothing of the kind. The butter subsidy would have ceased even had the country been rolling in wealth and the reduction of the wheat guarantee had been arranged a year before. It is true that actual savings have been made, but comparatively few of will come to hand during the present burrent financial year, and meanwhile the Estimates have been substantially tacreased. These are points upon which the House ought to have much to say.