PREMATURE ELECTION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 March 1943, Page 4

PREMATURE ELECTION

NO LONGER THREATENED IN AUSTRALIA. DISPUTE OVER TAX BILL SETTLED. (Special Australian Correspondent.) CANBERRA, March 16. The deadlock between the House of Representatives and the Senate over the Income Tax Rates Bill, which threatened an election, has been ended. At a conference of representatives of both Houses it was agreed that the Government should withdraw from the Income Tax Rates Bill the link with the National Welfare Bill to which the Senate objected on grounds of its unconstitutionality and “political trickery.” The Senate representatives agreed that immediately after the passage of the Income Tax Rates Bill the National Welfare Bill will be considered and that it will be completed by Thursday. “The only cause for regret is that the possibility of an election should ever have been raised on such an issue,” declares the “Sydney Morning Herald” today commenting editorially on the compromise between the House of Representatives and the Senate over the disputed clause in the Income Tax Rates Bill. “It would have been little short of disastrous,” adds the paper, “if this essentially political wrangle had plunged the country into the throes of a premature election and caused vital war ■ measures meanwhile to be shelved. The removal of the offending clause from the Bill is a sensible step in no way determental to the progarmme of the Government which, indeed, offered last week to meet the Senate’s wishes provided the National Welfare Fund Bill were considered first.”