The Press THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1942 The Cabinet

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23799, 19 November 1942, Page 4

The Press THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1942 The Cabinet

During the last few weeks the War Administration and the inner War Cabinet have been dissolved; the Hon. F. Langstone has resigned his office as Minister to Ottawa and announced that he will resign fispm the Cabinet when he returns; and the death of the Hon. H. T. Armstrong has removed another member of it, In addition, it must bo remembered that the Government’s first loss was that of its original leader; and that the duties of its ablest and most heavily burdened Minister, in Mr Nash, have had to be distributed among his colleagues, in order to free him for service in Washington. The relief that Mr Fraser gained in the experiment of the War Administration was not merely temporary; it was limited, obviously, by the conditions under which the experiment was adopted and carried on. Mr Fraser inherits from it the'assistance of Mr Coates and Mr Hamilton, which he had previously but which is confined to the conduct of the war, and of Mr McLagan. It is clear that, valuable as this help is, it is not sufficient to compensate for grave handicaps or to simplify the problems that Mr Fraser now faces. The distribution and redistribution of portfolios among his colleagues cannot alter or disguise the fact that he is disastrously short of men of first-rate capacity. The best he has are overworked and jaded. Among the others, mediocrity tails off into sheer incompetence. One consequence is that the Prime Minister is unable to find and to free from departmental routine the small group of capable Ministers whose time should be wholly devoted to the consideration and direction of a total war policy. Another consequence is that the administrative machine works slowly and badly. Moreover, while the Government declines to look beyond its own ranks for men to fill posts of representative responsibility oversea, a third consequence of its shortage of able men is that posts of great importance are not filled at ail or are filled unsuitably. The need to have a Minister established in Australia has long been evident and admitted; none has been sent. The need for a Minister in Canada was also great; but Mr Langstone was sent — and it is clear that, if Mr Nash had gone on to London, Mr Fraser was prepared to indulge Mr Langstone's ambitions by posting him at Washington. Mr Fraser’s problem, therefore, is not the relatively simple one of elevating the most suitable of his Parliamentary supporters to Mr Armstrong’s and Mr Langstone’s places in the Cabinet. He has also to find Mr Langstone’s successor in Ottawa; he has to find, at this late stage, a Minister for duty in Australia. Other appointments of this kind either ought to be considered now or will have to be considered soon. Finally, as Mr Fraser must be anxiously aware, these special demands merely emphasise the paramount necessity for Cabinet reorganisation: not for a reshuffle of portfolios, with one or two new old party hands to share them, but for a reconstruction in which every claim but the claims of energy, brains, will, and executive ability must be disregarded. The Prime Minister’s difficulty is increased by the prejudices and precedents with which caucus and party restrict their leader’s freedom to choose his Cabinet. If he defers to them, .he is unlikely to achieve anything better than a compromise. If he insists on, and obtains, a free hand, he will have, certainly not the wide field of choice that the head of a national government would have, but one wide enough to give him a real chance to meet his responsibility. If he cannot have that, the country is entitled to assert its own demand, and its right, to choose new representatives and new leaders.