SAUSAGE-MACHINE LEGISLATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8980, 14 November 1907, Page 4

SAUSAGE-MACHINE LEGISLATION.

Parliament is manufacturing legislation just now somewkat after the fashion of a butcher manfacturing sausages. The raw material goes in at one end of the legislative mach'iae and comes out at the other end with a rapidity that is astonishing. A Government policy measure is circulated to-day, and while the press critics are pointing out its defects for the morrow's issue of their journals lo and behold the bill has flown through all its stages in both Houses of 'Parliament. The procedure is scandalous, and a disgrace to our legislative institution. If it is necessary to fix a specific time for the prorogation it would be infinitely better to bring down only such measures as can within the time limit be properly considered by members of the two branches of Parliament, and to put off all others until next session. But we cannot see why members should not remain at their posts until such legislation as i« essential is passed decently and in order. During the first sixteen weeks of the session only about half-a-dozen Government hills w.ere passed —exclusive of consolidated measures —and the time of the Lower House was wasted in a most shameful manner. The Government did not discourage this waste of time as it might have done, hut rather encouraged it, by keeping back most of its bills till members were weary and longing to return to their homes. Then the Premier sprung upon the House between forty and fifty measures, a great many of which were highly controversial; and he is now putting them through as we have indicated, in sausage-machine fashion. They literally whiz through Parliament with dizzying effect, and no one outside the legislative halls can possibly iollow what is being done. Members themselves can have but the vaguest notion of their contents, and none whatever as to their bearing upon the' weal or woe of the country. It is utterly impossible to turn out satisfactory legislation under sach conditions; but our legislators seem to care little so long as they can get away withali possible speed from the duties they are elected to perform. The Government has by its devious methods won all along the line. It has got through, or is getting through —in titles at any rate—most of the measures which it had promised to place upon the Statute Book. The consequences to the country appear to be but a secondary consideration. But the people of the dominion have got used to this sort of thing, and when the long list of "bills passed" is issued upon the last day of the session and telegraphed abroad, they will probably be loud in their eulogy of the splendid work done by the Ward Administration. Quantity is often I more regarded than quality.