The Press Thursday, November 29, 1928. Government Without Authority?

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19480, 29 November 1928, Page 10

The Press Thursday, November 29, 1928. Government Without Authority?

It appears to be generally agreed that when Parliament assembles the Opposition Parties will without delay move a no-confidence motion, that the Government will be defeated after a short or long debate, and that somebody—either Sir Joseph Ward or Mr H. E. Holland —will take office. Those who are hoping that Sir Joseph Ward will succeed Mr Coates as Prime Minister are assuming that when the short session has ended Parliament will be prorogued for six or seven months. This assumption ignores the public interest very completely. The moment it became clear that the Government was defeated at the polls by a motley assemblage of Liberals, Reds, and Independents, the United Party began to clamour that the leader of a Party which had not gained a majority of the popular votes or won a majority of the seats in the House ought not to remain in office for even a week. Yet now these Liberals propose that the leader of a Party whose popular vote was nearly 50,000 less than the Prime Minister's, and whose representatives in the House are fewer than the Reform Party's, is entitled to rule the country, unchecked by Parliament, for half a year. It is manifestly wrong that anything like that should take place. If Sir Joseph Ward becomes Prime Minister, his title to remain so when the session ends will obviously be even less good than Mr Coates's is now. He ought to reflect that the public will begin to resent the commission of their affairs to a Party which is not even the largest of the minorities and which has had no mandate to take office even for five minutes. There is no want of audacity in the suggestion that this minority group should enjoy the powers and privileges, not to mention the emoluments, of government for six or seven months with Parliament in recess and unable to do anything. There would have been widespread public indignation, and the Liberals would have been loudest in complaint, if Mr Coates had proposed to carry on until June next before summoning the House to transact the country's business. Yet what the United Party proposes to do is an exactly similar thing, and with this much less excuse: that it is a smaller Party than Mr Coates's. The public will not be satisfied to see luxuriating in office, and administering the country's affairs without any mandate, a Ministry which has not the confidence of the country, which polled less than a third of the people's votes, which won only a third of the seats in Parliament, and which will have slipped into office only through the aid of the Socialists against whom the nation gave a very clear judgment. If he takes office, and dares thus to assume the right to govern under these conditions, Sir Joseph Ward may argue that he is the trustee of all the anti-Reform votes. In that case he must take the responsibility for everything in the trustors' policies, including the whole of the Socialist programme. Apart altogether from the impropriety of so harmful a travesty of constitutional methods, there is this fact to be considered: that the Leader of the United Party throughout his campaign stressed very heavily his intention to procure the immediate enac of legislation which would cur" the country of the ills which he said it was suffering from. If the case is as urgent as he and his friends declared it to be, he ought, if he takes office, to carry on, with a short adjournment over the Christmas holidays, and save the country as completely and as speedily as possible. And this is what his colleagues will insist upon his doing if they have any better aim than the enjoyment of office for as long a period as possible, unchecked by Parliament, regardless of propriety and indifferent to consequences.