AUSTRALIA’S NEED

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 8, 4 October 1941, Page 10

AUSTRALIA’S NEED

Ending Welter Of Pure Politics The Canberra correspondent of the “Sydney Morning Herald,” writing on Monday last, said:— From the Australian viewpoint any Budget fight, or any Budget compromise, must be decided with all possible speed. No close observer of the Canberra scene believes that the' nation can much longer afford in wartime the welter of pure' politics that has been proceeding since Mr. Menzies’s returh in May from London. One. conscientious senior Minister frankly, told this correspondent last Friday that politics were now seriously eating into the time he required for the administration of his department, that he would welcome a decision which would show what party was in power, and that he was getting t 0 the point of not caring which way the decision -went. Through his first month of Prime Ministership, Mr. Fadden’s life has “just been one damned thing after another.” Mr. Wilson is the seventy-third man in a House which without him would divide 36-all. Fluctuating hopes of Mr. Wilson’s support have, since the beginning of this Parliament, based themselves on the belief that Mr. Wilson’s financial ideas are more radical than Labour’s own. However, in this association some observers see this Budget as providing plenty of footholds by which Labour Governments of future years may climb to their own, and perhaps Mr. Wilson’s, financial goals. Mr. Wilson, it is held, will be nobody’s fool —also nobody’s Mephistopheles. Impartial observers recognize him as one of Parliament’s most honest members —sometimes perhaps a little over-dominated by his personal responsibility to a wheat-growing electorate, but definitely out to get a maximum war effort with the least discomfort to what he considers “underdog” sections of the Australian community.