CONFIDENCE ISSUES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 July 1938, Page 7

CONFIDENCE ISSUES

t SECOND AMENDMENT MOVED IN HOUSE PARTIES MOMENTARILY GET TOGETHER. OPPOSITION PROPOSALS PRUNED. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. Something of a stir was created in the House of Representatives yesterday afternoon when Mr A. C. A. Sexton (Independent, Franklin) moved a further no-confidence amendment to the Address-in-Reply motion. The grounds of the amendment were that the Government had taken no steps to abolish fixed political parties in the House, nor had it provided ' for the taking of a free and impartial vote. The subsequent divisions were the first this session, and in one case there \vas the odd spectacle of Government and Opposition members voting together in one lobby. As a result of the voting all that now remains of the Opposition amendment is “we deem it our duty to represent to your Excellency that your Excellency’s Advisers have forfeited the confidence of the House.”

Aiming, as it did, at the abolition of the party system, Mr Sexton’s amendment did not prove acceptable to either the Government or the Opposition. Since this second amendment sought to remove all the reasons advanced by the Leader of the Opposition for lack of confidence in the Government, the first question put to the House by the Speaker, the Hon W. E. Barnard, concerned the retention or otherwise of these grounds. Obviously the Government had to vote in favour of them being struck out and its members went into the lobby with Mr Sexton and Mr H. M. Rushworth (Independent, Bay of Islands), the result of the division being that the Opposition’s grounds for no-confidence were struck out by 39 votes to 11.

The next question was whether Mr Sexton’s reason for lack of confidence —the retention of the party systemshould stand. Mr Sexton himself insisted on a division and into the same lobby walked Government and Opposition members. Shouts of laughter could be heard from members over this unusual alliance, to be drowned subsequently in the singing of the song “The More We Are Together.” Mr Sexton’s amendment was defeated by 47 votes to three, the only member voting with Mr Sexton and Mr Rushworth being Mr R. A. Wright (Independent, Wellington Suburbs).

“We have just had a happy time together,” said the Minister of Mines, the Hon P. C. Webb, who rose to speak in the debate immediately after the division. “It is perhaps significant that it took a sexton to get us together.”

As a result of the two divisions, a no-confidence amendment is still before the House, but it is shorn of all the specific charges levelled against the Government.