The No-Confidence Amendment

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19971, 4 July 1930, Page 12

The No-Confidence Amendment

The Leader of the Opposition, in moving his no-confidence amendment to the Address-in-Reply, took the trouble to declare its object; but a duty so clear hardly needed this preface. It ia the duty of the Leader of the Opposition to test and disclose the position* of the Government at once and in the most direct way. The Government is in a minority in the House. It has failed to do what it promised to do, and it has made a bungle or a disaster of nearly everything that it has done. It has neither earned nor has it ever possessed the confidence of the electorate. It has certainly not earned the confidence of the House, nor, though it survives and may still survive, does it in any real sense possess that confidence. But if, when tested by a plain in-or-out division of the House, it remains in office, it can remain there only under favour of Labour; and if this is a vote of " confidence " in the technical sense, it is one of which nobody is so dull as to misunderstand the true meaning. The confidence it expresses is simply Labour's confidence in its ability to get something out of the Government or to force something on to the Government, a sort of confidence which it should gall any Party with political self-respect to possess. A# for the speeches so far in the debate, they break little new ground, unless it is Mr Hansom's new claim on behalf of the Government. The Minister declares that the Government has opened a "new era" in land settlement. Until the Government has found and established its settlers and shown that they can make a living, it should be carefully silent on the subject of land; for it has opened no now era in anything but the indirect discouragement of land settlement by loading the land with taxes and the direct victimisation of the farmer already on the land.