THE OPPOSITION.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2407, 4 October 1892, Page 3

THE OPPOSITION.

A Wellington correspondent of the Lyttelton Times writes : —A renir.i-k.ible ;\nd moat agreeable change has come over the spirit of the House of Representatives during the last two days and nights. The Oppesition appears to have dispensed with the services of Messrs Fish, Valentine, and Mackenzie, and to be now doing its proper constitutional work in a perfectly legitimate maimer. It has watched with keen interest in committee every line of the Land and Income Tax Bill and has tried numereus amendments with very little success, but the watching has been mostly done by men who knew what they were talking abont, and who talked to convince, not merely to waste time. Ever since the illness of the Premier there has been a degeneration in the order and dignity of debate that has been most painful to witness. The coarsest epithets tnd the most unfounded accusations have been hurled from side to side by men who seemed to bo restrained by no sense of responsibility, and the Ministerial party was beginning to lose confidence in its leaders, and in its organisation ; but during the present week the Hon. J. G. Ward has quietly come to the front, and has taken charge of the Estimates and Bills which Mr Ballance's illness had left without a legitimate or competent guardian. He has mastered his new work so quickly as to almost completely supply the place of their natural parent. The Insurance estimates were attacked by Mr Fish, in a manner which was extremely humiliating to the House, and might have provoked even a goodtempered man to retort in a similar style, especially as the accusations were chiefly directed against a sick and absent man ; but his attacks rolled oft' the back of the cool-headed and courteous PostmasterGeneral as harmlessly as water rolls off a duck's back, and a few calm words of truth were made to expose the absolute baselessness of all Mr Fish's fabrications. Coming next to the Land and Income Tax Bill, Mr Ward showed a wonderful capacity for all the intricacies of double or single taxation, of debentures, mortgnges, partnerships and dummyism, which that Bill had to contend with, and, having proved that it takes two to make a quarrel, he proved also that his physical power was equal to the fearful strain of two long nights' badgering, during the whole of which his mental powers had to be constantly on the alert.