The Dominion FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1908. A DILEMMA AND ITS MEANING.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 305, 18 September 1908, Page 6

The Dominion FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1908. A DILEMMA AND ITS MEANING.

— —-— ■ There is an aspect of the legislative scandal in connection with the Second Ballot Bill which has been overlooked in the outburst of indignation at that bad measure. Many people are wondering whether, when the Bill is returned to the House from the Council, it will be within the power of the House to excise the obnoxious proposal to suppress the holding of public meetings, between ballots. Most members of the House, it is quite certain, would be glad to undo their handiwork if they could. But it is very doubtful whether the House, when, it receives the Bill from the Council, will be .able to delete the clause that was so hastily swallowed at the end of the Committee discussion. In May's Parliamentary Practice the chapter on Con-, fcrences proceeds throughout on the assumption that the disagreement necessitating a Conference of the Houses proceeds from an amendment by the Upper House to which the Lower House has strong objections. There is ample room for such amendments, and such amendments of those amendments as will procure the final agreement necessary to save the Bill. But the position with respect to the Second Ballot Bill is of a different kind. The House will probably disagree with the Council's excision of the proviso that a majority of 500 shall be considered an absolute majority. But the chief anxiety of members of the House, we should 'say, will be to cancel the " gag " clause. The House, according to May, will not be able to do this. "An amendment made by one House," it is laid down in Chapter XIX, " to an amendment made by the other must be relevant to the same subject matter. . . . It is' also a rule that neither House may, at this time, leave out or otherwise amend anything which they have already passed themselves; unless such amendment be immediately consequent upon the acceptance or rejection of an amendment of the other House." The procedure of the British Parliament, that is to say, is inadequate to meet any anxiety by the House to delete its own " gag " clause. The reason is simple. The British Parliament has framed its rules and built up the body of its practice on the assumption that a House is a deliberative body, and that it never passes any Bill or any clause which it has not strongly desired to. pass after due deliberation, and which it as strongly desires to defend against amendment. "In 1678," May says, "it was stated by the Commons at a conference ' that it is contrary to the constant method and proceedings of Parliament to strike out anything in a Bil) which hath been fully agreed and passed by both Houses and in allowing consequential amendments, cither in the body of the Bill, or in the amendments, the spirit of this rule is still maintained. So binding, indeed, has it been held, that in 1850, a serious oversight, as to the commencement of the Act, having been discovered in the Pirates' Head Money Bill, before the Lords' amendments had been agreed to, no attempt was made to correct it by way of amendment, but a separate Act was passed for the purpose." And this doctrine has worked very well in the British Parliament. There it is not contemplated that, a House will jmsa a claoßC .without uu-

derstanding its purport and agreeing to its principle, and the rules of procedure do not therefore contain any means whereby a House can withdraw, ivlien it realises the situation, what it enacted in a condition of stupid incautiousness. Indeed, the rules of procedure definitely forbid such a correction on the sound principle that to permit it would be to encourage carelessness in an institution in which care and vigilance are supremely necessary. These facts illustrate very well the wide distance that separates tho New Zealand House of Representatives from the British conception of a thoughtful and thoroughly deliberative Assembly. The .dilemma, in which many members of the House find themselves is a dilemma which British Parliamentary practice fails, to provide for, since it is a dilemma which it is assumed no intelligent Assembly could possibly get itself into. The position is merely another fact in' support of the contention, which we have urged beforo now, and which others have held beforo us and still hold, that the political conditions of the past dozen years have produced a House that cannot claim to be in any sense an independent deliberative body. The crude and faulty statutes passed every year, to be exposed as unworkable the moment they are tested, and sometimes even beforo the last member has taken the train for home; the festoons of amendments annually necessary for ,the correction of the mistakes of the preceding year and tho years before that —these characteristics of New Zealand legislation could not exist if members gave any real thought to their work. And why is thought so largely a missing quality in the House of Representatives J In part because the wrong men get elected. It was Mil. Seddon's settled policy to procure, by the notorious methods of modern " Liberalism," the election of the men least likely to question his proposals or to act contrary to his wishes. The result is a House willing to agree to practically anything the Government may propose, and the consequent passing of ill-considered legislation without proper revision.