Fitting the Punishment

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25589, 2 September 1948, Page 4

Fitting the Punishment

It is a pity that the discussion which followed when the Minister of Labour gave his written answer to a question put by the member for Patea should have grown so hot over side-issues. The real one was almost or quite forgotten. The Minister may bear an initial responsibility and some later; but he was not alone. It would not have done and his standing, in unionism any harm if, having been asked for an assurance that “any attempt by “trade union officials to frustrate “ or impede the enforcement of pen“alties properly inflicted by the “ Courts will not be tolerated by the “ Government ”, he had incorporated the assurance in his answer. It would not have been harder to go on to say, then, what was in effect all he chose to say: that, in the affair described in the note to Mr Sheat’s question, the union’s action “ appeared ” to be consistent with the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act and to support the law. In other words, when a New Plymouth magistrate ordered two young vandals to do such-and-such work in the borough reserves and when a union sought to nullify the effect by having them paid union rates as union members, the union was only “ upholding the provisions “of the law”. Why? Because, in the opinion of the Crown Law Office, the magistrate had no power to fit the punishment to the offence in this way—no power to order the youths to work for nothing on pub - lic property because they had wantonly destroyed public property; though it does not “ appear ”, in the Minister’s answer, that the union knew the Crown Law Office opinion when it intervened. These were the circumstances in which the House heard the Minister attack the Opposition as a set of screws, whn would cut wages or make men work for nothing if they could; heard him and the member for Patea exchange compliments in red; heard the Minister charged w’ith condoning vandalism; heard one of his supporters characterise the member for Patea “ and others like him ” as men longing for the day when magistrates would direct free labour to their farms; and so on. Most of this was silly and nasty; all of it was irrelevant.' If the Crown Law Office is right, and the Crown Lav/ Office does not often blunder in such matters, then the real question is whether the law should not be amended. Such orders of public service to requite a public injury have been given before and carried out, unchallenged. They embody a salutary kind of justice. Everybody * understands it; it fits the case; it is ' socially constructive. Then the real

issue, yesterday, was whether legal obstructions to its discretionary use should not. be removed. It was the issue that nobody took up.