EXTENDED DEBATE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 September 1941, Page 5

EXTENDED DEBATE

ON EMERGENCY REGULATIONS BILL GROWTH OF BUREAUCRACY CRITICISED. CRIMES AMENDMENT MEASURE. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. The Emergency Regulations Amendment Bill, which validates new regulations made under the principal Act and extends the term of others previously in force, was keenly debated by the Opposition in the House of Representatives during part of yesterday afternoon and most of last evening. The Bill was put through the remaining stages and passed, with only threequarters of an hour of the sitting left. Members of the Opposition directed attention to the increasing volume of law by Order-in-Council. One speaker, Mr Doidge, Tauranga, described Parliament as a smoke-screen to cover the activities of those who really governed the country —a civil service bureaucracy. The Leader of the , Opposition, Mr Holland, charged the Government with making regulations under the war emergency for domestic purposes and with no relation to the war.

Replying, the Acting-Prime Minister, Mr Nash, said that if the House sat for 12 hours a day for every working day of the year it would be a physical impossibility to consider the regulations in statute form. He added that it would be wrong to use the war regulations to achieve domestic jurisdiction. A start was made with the second reading of the Crimes Amendment Bill, which proposes the abolition of the death penalty for murder, and also flogging and whipping as punishments for crime. The Attorney-General, Mr Mason, who moved the second reading, said the purpose of the Bill was not to enter upon uncharted seas, but to bring New Zealand law into line with that of many other countries.

The House rose at 10.30 p.m. till 2.30 this afternoon, when the debate on the Crimes Amendment Bill will continue.