THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1904. THE REFERENDUM BILL.

Evening Post, Volume LXVIII, Issue 96, 20 October 1904, Page 4

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1904. THE REFERENDUM BILL.

The treatment which tiie Referendum Bill received from the House of Representatives last night will give satisfaction to all who have any respect left 'for the independence of our Parliamentary institutions. The House has trifled with the question far too long, voting for it time after time with a complaisant insincerity, partly because it might seem "undemo--cratic " to oppose it, and partly because members have felt certain that the Bill would meet its doom in "another place." There has also been the additional motive at work that, if the Bill did go through, it would relieve the representatives of the people from the responsibility of forming any opinion on a number of difficult questions which could be referred instead to the sovereign people for their direct decision. For the ordinary member the referendum, and for the Ministry a Royal Commission appear to point a delightfully easy escape from many of their most pressing troubles, and to hasten on the happy day when the politician will never lose a vote for expressing an unpopular opinion, because he will never need to express any opinion at all. He will " trust the jgeojle n - to do the logi^Upuj,

and they will trust him to draw his honora-EHim; whereby a fair division of labour will be established and nobody will be hurt. As Mr. Millar has well said, " The is the sheet anchor of the shuffler," and unless we wish to endow political shuffling with even higher privileges than it already enjoys, we must be very careful about extending the scope of a principle which has such a plausible sound, and accords so well with many current theories and prejudices. Within strict limits the principle may be applied to supplement our representative institutions in a useful manner, and to provide a convenient escape from a. deadlock, but applied in a wholesale and indiscriminating fashion it may enervate or supplant those institutions altogether. Oddly enough, the House yesterday, after swallowing the Bill holus-bolus on so many previous occasions, began its objections to the Bill at one of its least objectionable features. If there is any place for the referendum at all, it must be when the two branches of the Legislature have differed, and requires the people, from whom the authority of both is ultimately derived, to adjust the matter in dispute. In such a case the question must have been thoroughly and publicly discussed before the people could be called upon to "decide, and theoretically who is there to arbitrate unless it be either the constituencies or the sovereign? and practically who but the former? But, as is inevitable in any Parliamentary discussion, a single principle can rarely be isolated and debated by itself, and the utterly unprincipled and indefensible qualification of the principle which was also proposed by the Bill properly entered into the discussion and influenced the voting. The most important ditierence between last year's Bill and the present one is that an exemption from the referendum is now proposed of any question touching the reform or abolition of the Legislative Council. The Premier's theory is that the Council rejected the Bill last year for fear that its own constitution might become the subject of a referendum vote, in which case it is certain that tho decision could not be favourable to the existing status. The absurd effect of the exception the Premier now proposes was well pointed out by Mr. Taylor last night. No question for the reform of the Legislative Council may be submitted to the people, but the "Council, by passing in two consecutive sessions any Bill which the Hotiee rejects, may make it the subject of a referendum, and this power would apparently extend, for instance, to a proposal to abolish the application of the principle of election to the . popular chamber, and to make it a nominated body like the other. The spirited opposition offered by the House to this absurd proposal does it credit, and it is appropriate that a provision which was cleverly designed to smooth the passage of the measure in the Council may prove a fatal etuinbling-block to the Hou.se. By 30 votes to 27 the first cardinal principle of the Bill was struck out, and the Premier's motion to report progress immediately afterwards was also lost by 31 to ad. Later-on the motion was agreed to, and it remains to be seen whether he can engineer a sufficient support to the Bill when it is recommitted to revise the decision recorded last night. He is right in interpreting that decision if unreversed to mean death to the Bill, and"* we hope that the House will stand firm. We want no more shams on the statute-book.