Legislative Council

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25954, 7 November 1949, Page 6

Legislative Council

If the statements of Mr P. Kearins, the Labour candidate for Waimarino, were taken at face value, the omission from the Labour policy of any reference to the Legislative Council would be surprising; but the Government’s- attitude in the House of Representatives in the last few years should have prepared electors for its silence now. The National Party, on the other hand, shows welcome signs of having thought again since it proposed abolition as the easiest method of reform. In fairness to Mr Holland and his 'supporters it should be pointed out that under the law they could not, in Opposition, have introduced any other sort of a bill. Though they still propose that the Upper House, as now constituted, should go, they are prepared to consider some better way of providing the checks and balances of which Mr R. M. Algie has often spoken. In the debates in the House the impression was given that legislators, particularly Labour legislators, looked on the Upper House as a sort of backstop to field slips in drafting that might pass the Lower House. If that were the Council’s only function, the Statutes Revision Committee could probably do it equally well. But that should certainly not be the Council’s only function. Reduced to its simplest terms, the case for a second chamber is that it should prevent the representative chamber from doing something for which it has no mandate, and for which it might not get a mandate. This safeguard exists only in theory when the party in power has complete control of the Upper House. It should not be impossible to devise a method of appointment that would establish a small chamber qualified and minded to exercise its proper functions.