Our Parliamentary Letter.

Bruce Herald, Volume XXXXXI, Issue 84, 26 October 1905, Page 3

Our Parliamentary Letter.

• [Fuo.m Our Own Correspondent.] Wellington, October 21. The end of the session came into si<;ht on the first day of the week. Mr Seddon brought the interesting stranger down to the House in company with one of his genial statements. This was delivered with a careless wave of the hand and was to the effect that if the members only chose to exert themselves and say nothing the whole pack of the business would be got through by the 25th. The relief throughout the House was great. The session has outstayed its welcome. Everybody is sick and tired of the style to which the proceedings are reduced, which is the electioneering style pure and simple. One begins in times like these to cast thoughtful glances at our Parliamentary system. Triennial it is ; and it is freely admitted that the first session of the three is wasted, because the members know nothing ; that the last comes to nothing, because they won't do anything, while the middle is the only one left for nope of usefulness. The shadow of the General Election has grown something more substantial than a mere reflection of legislatorial hopes and fears. We have now the lists of the can--1 didates. Already there are 228 candidates wooing the electors. Of these 78 are sitting members (only two retiring from public life this time — viz., Messrs Thomson, of the Clutha, and Witheford, of Auckland) ; 17 have had seats in the House in former Parliaments, and there are 133 of the great unknown. The ambition of the " mute inglorious Miltons " is responsible for more electioneering than usual. Among the old hands seeking to revisit the glimpses of the moon there is one who has held Ministerial rank, the Hon. T. W. Hislop. He was a member of j the last Atkinson Ministry, and actually drafted the first series of Labor Bills. The new men who came in on the wave raised by the great strike found them in pigeonholes, and either appropriated them or treated them with the contempt they deserved j you will take your choice according to your political color. A noteable name in one way in the veteran list is that of Ivess, familiarly known in many country parts, where he is the terror of the country press, as " The Rag Planter." He sailed in on one of those rags in the ear l^ eighties, serving a couple of Parliament*., id was never missed since his retirement The likeliest of the batch to find a seat is Mr Russell (G. W.), who is running for Riccarton, and the unlikeliest is Mr Earnshaw, once the foremost of the Labor members, now the evil example of the consequences of indiscipline while in Parliament and of the inability to take a licking like a man out of it. There is also Mr Shera, who used to follow Sir George Grey like a faithful poodle into every lobby and sample every danger that threatened, whose reward was ever such as were we to print the sulphurous expression of the same here we should be in the dock at the plaint, under criminal libel law, of an angry Shera. Mr Collins is there, who went out because he gave up to the lecture platform what was meant for party ; and Mr Hornsby, whose chief virtue is not tact; and "Jack" Stevens, who, to the sorrow of his friends, has lost most of his sight, but is thought to have retained enough to be able to see his name on top of the poll of the Manawatn ; and F. Pirani, who went out because he was a thorn in the Seddonian side, and, being still the thorn, is likely to stay out unless he gets a wolf to put on sheep's clothing to divide the votes of the Ministerial flock, which is not absolutely enthusiastic about the sitting member, Mr Wood. P. J. O'Regan, who will probably beat Mr Fisher of the voucher fame, stands still for Henry George, with a trace of the good sense he lacked in his younger days ; Marsden Thompson has moaned for three years over the consequences of ill-advised asperity and does not seem well advised enough yet to be able to obtain the certainty of return ; M 'Lean has the Ministerial stamp for one of the Wellington seats, but is admittedly a back number ; as is also Petrie, who opposes Mr Speaker, a number as far back as the best part of a quarter of a century. There is Moore, of Kaiapoi, who was the most meritorious of the minor members of the nineties and the greatest of all possible Parliamentary bores. Barclay is to the front after expiating too much friendliness for one Paul Kruger at an inopportune time ; Maslin stands arrayed in a garment of asperity against the powers that be, dashed with a tinge of the color obnoxious to local politicians ; and Gilfedder hopes, with the addition of the legal stamp which he (like O'Regan) has acquired in the interval of cool outer shade, to make in the House that mark which is his due, but which he did not make on the last occasion of service. The number of the veteran contingent is unusually large. The next thing to strike one in the lists is a thing which may get worse or better as people are wise or foolish. It is the large number of constituencies that are' wooed by a plurality of candidates. At present there are 26 with three candidates to kiss the babies and promise happiness — domestic, rural, and civic ; seven with four, two with five, two with m, and we with

eight. The Maori seats run three, four, six, six. Of the rest there are 33 seats with two candidates each, and five where the sitting man has no opposition as yet — viz., Kumara, Awarua, Bruce, Buller, and Motueka. Of Beats provided with candidates above three there are, at the present moment, 42. Naturally there is a howl for the Second Ballot BilL But this can only be passed this session if there is unanimity and absence of obstruction. But opinions are hopelessly divided about the matter, and there is as much chance of a second ballot for the election as there is of a railway to the moon. If the state of things is not altered the country will have to leave off talking the representation of minorities and endure it with what philosophy it may. Perhaps the cause is not so much the obstinacy inherent in political man as in the change that is gradually coming over the political dreams of the country. Party government, when strong, could confine most of the issues to tbe simple letters "G" and " O." But now there h i o sprung up Independents j,n»i Independent Oppositionists, liiberal and Labor men and Reform Leaguers and New Liberals, all begin to crystalise into a real opposition — all the men who were content to be known as the "Left Wing" of the Government party. The change does no good to the Opposition proper, wliich remains in as hopeless a minority as ever. But it emphasises the difficulty of making again the fair division which is essential of party government. After all there is balm in Gilead. The strength of these new party Serms is not overpowering enough even to ivide the constituencies into disastrous division. It is quite possible that the majority will rule in most cases and record their rule in no uncertain figures. The additions to the electoral roll made by the machinery set in motion by the Government have now reached, by house to house canvass, 107,845. This brings the number on the roll to over half a million, as the number in 1902 was 415,789. At the same time, as there were at the lastnamed date a number not on the roll a.p;pjre£j»t.ing a, percentage of not less than 23-31, the rolls are still short of what they ought to be by nearly 100,000, even allowing something for the deaths. The cost of the operation was £6,200. The next thing will be to invent something which will make all these people vote now that they are on the roll. Since 1893— the year in which the first woman's vote was recorded in New Zealand— the percentages of voters to the enrolled have ranged as follows : —

If the percentages of non-voters keeps going on we shall have to deplore the abstention of something like 100,000 voters. There must, of course, be a certain proportion of sickness. But twenty-live per cent, could only be set down 'by libelling the climate of New Zealand. When the week ended the end of tlie session was farther off than it had been at the beginning. The cause was stonewall. The Government brought down on Thursday afternoon a Bill to amend the Criminal Code Act so as to make the spoken word amenable to criminal punishment as the written. It is, of course, eminently just that the man who slanders you on the public platform should be amenable to the same punishment as the man who published the slander in his newspaper. But there was a minority of the House which scented clanger, saw too wide a scope in the thing, and regarded the thing as a net, the meshes of which would catch not only every fish of the sea but every gnat of the atmosphere and every innocent tiling that crawls into view on the plate of the microscope. Therefore they dubbed the the Bill bad names and they stonewalled the same. The customary exaggerations of the stonewall kept possession for 28 hours. It was twenty-eight hours of sleepy badinage, pretended points of order, simulated terrors, and a broad burlesque of Parliamentary procedure. Members were named, and nothing came of it. Standing orders were broken and drawn tighter just as chance seemed to direct. Insinuations and direct statements vied with each o titer for notoriety and combined to defeat the rulings of the chair. But on the Friday night the stonewall began to totter visibly. All through the night of Thursday Messrs Moss, Bedford, Taylor, and Harding had faced the music. On Friday the Opposition proper came to their aid. Friday night they were left to themselves. It was too much for them. They were not the stuff of which the old stonewall breed is made. They collapsed. The strange thing is that the compromise to which they consented was the very measure of reform which the Government wanted. It is an old game of Dick's to ask for more than he wants, and he played it for all it was worth— namely, exactly what he wanted.

Year. Men. Women. 1893 ... 69-61 85-18 1896 ... 75-90 76-44 1899 ... 79 OG 75 70 1902 ... 78-44 74-52