THE WEEK IN THE HOUSE

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25870, 1 August 1949, Page 6

THE WEEK IN THE HOUSE

THIN ATTENDANCES BUSINESS OVERSHADOWED BY REFERENDUM (From Our Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, July 31. Many times last week the House of Representatives just escaped the discomfiture of hearing the ringing of the bells that marks the lack of a quorum. With many members, including the leaders of both parties away on the referendum campaign, both the Government and Opposition benches were bound to be thinly filled, but it was surprising how many hours in the week the debates were listened to by 23 or 24 members. Sometimes four or five of those 24 were Ministers who were so busy with their Ministerial papers at their desks that-they might as well have been working in the more comfortable and less distracting quarters of their own rooms. Parliament had decided against an adjournment. however, and so there had to be a quorum. On Wednesday afternoon the House debated first earnestly and then angrily the answers to questions, the conclusion being a clash, unequalled in the present session, between the Minister of Health (Miss M. B. Howard) and Mr W. A. Sheat (Opposition. Patea). Miss Howard, whose department had refused to allow a small maternity hospital authority to buy a floor-polishing machine, offered to polish the floors herself to show how little such a machine was needed, and her feminine and Ministerial dignities were both upset when Mr Sheat retorted that a charge*should be made for admission and the proceeds used to buy the machine anyway. One angry word led to far too many others.

It was not the first clash there has been between the Minister of Health and critical members of the Opposition this session, and it is safe to say it will not be the last. For the peace of the House it is to be hoped that none of those to come will be as fierce. Volunteer Firemen On Wednesday evening the Govern* ment had willy nilly to come back to a subject about which it is becoming increasingly restive and embarrassed — how many or how few volunteer firemen will have to join a union. Mr W. G. Goosman (Opposition, Piako), who himself claimed knowledge of the work of volunteer firemen from experience, had previously given notice of a private bill, the effect of which would have been to exempt all volunteers from joining a union. The House had agreed, as it does early in the session with private members’ bills, to set aside Wednesday evening for it. but, in the meantime. the Fire Services Bill, containing a clause dealing with the same matter, had come forward, and gone on to a committee. Mr Goosman’s bill was therefore an embarrassment to the Government. A vote against it might have been construed as Government opposition to the volunteers; a vote for it by the Government was impossible because of the other bill. To have talked it out would have involved some three. hours of impromptu platitudes by Government speakers, a prospect from which even the hardiest Government back-bench-ers shrank. Astuteness produced the ideal solution, delaying Mr Goosman’s bill for three months; in effect, as Mr M. H. Oram (Opposition, Manawatu) said, for ever.

For the rest of the week the House discussed the bill that licenses masseurs and calls them physiotherapists, got its teeth (but not very sharply) into the Industrial Relations Bill, and then had, on Friday, the dreariest Imprest Supply Bill debate for years. This discussion on New Zealand’s economic development initiated by Mr C. M. Bowden (Opposition. Karori) and spoken to by 13 other members, covered a bewildering scope of territory and finished by getting nowhere, except. of course, authorising the expenditure of some £20.703.000 to carry on the business of the Government for the next few weeks. Evidently, members are more concerned at the moment with what happens in the referendum —on which an anti-conscrip-tion sneaker in Wellington estimated £93.000 of Government money has already been spent on publicity—than on what hanpens in the House. The Minister of Finance (Mr Nash) will be back this week, but Parliament cannot be expected to settle down until after the referendum.