Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1918. PARLIAMENTARY RULE & PLEBISCITES

Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 14, 16 January 1918, Page 6

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1918. PARLIAMENTARY RULE & PLEBISCITES

If-regarded separately, the principle of tile referendum and the principle of a democratic Government's responsibility to Parliament and to people are both in themselves coherent and consistent; but their blending has produced in Australia one of the strangest constitutional tangles on record. As the situation cannot be explained without setting forth the detail, perhaps it. is as well to tabulate the pertinent facts light away. They are as follow:

(1) The Hughes Government wished to enforce military compulsion. Four methods were open—(a) Enforcement by decreo of the. Government itself, acting through the Governor-General; (b) enactment by Government and Parliament, by means of an Act passed by the latter without consulting the electors; (c) enactment by Government and Parliament after consulting the electors, such consultation taking the form of dissolution and general election, resulting in a popular mandate; (d) enactment by Government and Parliament after consulting the electors and obtaining their consent by means of a referendum. The Hughes Government chose the last course.

(2) At the first referendum on military compulsion, held in October, 1916, the electors answered No.

(3) The consequent Labour split led to the formation of tho Hughes-Cooit (Nationalist) Government, which came before the electors in May, 1917. Had it placed military compulsion in the forefront of its programme, it could, if returned, have at once enacted compulsion, through a compulsion - Parliament. Instead, it pledged itself, through Mr Hughes, not to introduce compulsion except after an appeal to the people, by which was meant a second referendum. That was Pledge No. 1. (4) The second i compulsion referendum campaign began, and Mr. Hughes gave Pledgo No. 2, by declaring that the Government would not carry on without the compulsory powers it was asking for. (From this stage the 'conflict between the referendum theoryE;and the Parliamentary theory of'responsibility becomes acute.) (5) At the second referendum on military compulsion, held in December, 1917, the electors again answered No. . (6) Mr. Hughes ,placed himself in the hands of the Nationalist Party caucus, which did the following things in the following order—(a) Re-elected Mr. Hughes as Leader of the.party,, with only two dissentients, and with the support of even such an apostle of Parliamentary responsibility as Sir William Irvine; (b) declared against handing over the Government to the official Labour (Tudor) Party; (c) left it in the hands of the Government to decide what steps should be taken to honour Pledge No. 2. Also, the caucus rejected a motion in favour of a Nationalist Government of new blood under Mr. Austin Chapman. ■ . ' (7) The honouring of Pledge No. 2 being thus left to the Government, the Government decided to honour it by resigning, and did so. The GovernorGeneral, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, then consulted Mr. Tudor and other members of Parliament. Finally, the Gover-nor-General sent for Mr. Hughes and requested him to accept a commission to form a new Government. Mr. Hughes consulted the Nationalist caucus, and, with its approval, decided tol accept the Governor-General's commission. His new Government turned out to bo the old Government. . ' (8) When Parliament met, Mr. Tudor moved a censure motion, the debate on which is still incomplete.

The beginning of trouble was when the Hughes Government decided on compul-sion-by-referendum. That bad beginning was confirmed when, in the May election campaign, Mr. Hughes gave Pledge No. 1, tying himself afresh to the referendum. It is now easy to see that, save for. this pledge, the present, trouble would never have arisen; it is, however, fair to add that, without this'pledge, the Nationalist Party might not have been returned at all. But if Pledge No. 1 contained the seeds of trouble, Pledge No. 2 multiplied them. It was given under pressure from critics, friendly and otherwise, who contended that Ministers could not wash their hands by devolving their responsibility upon the electors; and it really amounted to a compromise between a referendum" and a general election. During this second referendum campaign, Mr. Hughes had been told by the critics that, • instead of merely advocating compulsion, he and his party should be standing before the electors for acceptance or rejection, and prepared to stand or fall by the compulsory power they asked for. He tried to meet the criticism by pledging that the Government would not carry on without those powers; but ho quite overlooked or ignored the vital fact that while the referendum could make or unmake compulsion, it could not make or unmake Parliament. His compromise between the referendum and the Parliamentary courses is now seen to have all the weaknesses of a hybrid with not one of those advantages that hybridisation has •on occasions been known to confer.

Proof of that fact was not finally demonstrated till the case came at last before the Governor-General. Parliament is governed by majority rule, and it is the constitutional duty of the Governor- : General, as representing the Crown, to .exhaust the possibilities of Parliament, in the way of government, before dissolving Parliament and sending members to the country. Now, all visible evidence .goes to show that, however much the second No vote may have discredited the Government in the country, it did not in any -way affect the majority m Parliament. If the struggle for the popular vote had been between Hughes and Tudor, instead of between a Hughes idea and a Tudor idea, then a Tudor win would presumably have meant a Tudor Parliament—in a uni-cameral- election this would certainly have been the case —and the Governor-General's course •would have been plain. But. could the Governor-General, because of a popular vote not on Parliament's personnel but •on a single question, presume to dissolve Parliament? Could hs take that extreme step without exhausting all the possibilities of Parliament, including Mr. Hughes's apparently unimpaired majority? If the Governor-General had commissioned Mr. Tudor to. form a Ministry, that Ministry could have been immediately defeated by tho Nationalists, whose caucus resolution—see section (b) of paragraph No. 6—had clearly advertised their intention to do so. To meet this 'peril, Mr. Tudor almost certainly would have intimated to the Governor-General,- at their interview, that he would form a Ministry only on condition of boing ißV*ntß.4 a jlis*elusieii in th.a eveat si Ms

defeat.. But could the Governor-General grant such a condition while Parliament still contained unexhausted governing possibilities? To that question, we think, most constitutionalists will return an uncompromising negative. Everything goes to show that the Governor-General has so far done his duty. It is not his fault that such a. unique constitutional tangle has been created.

It was not the Governor-General, but the Nationalist Party, that could have given Mr. Hughes his coup de grace. Or, alternatively, Mr. Hughes might have done it himself by self-effacement. After the calamities culminating in. the second No vote (see paragraph 5), a new start could have been made, but right at the outset (see paragraph 6) the Nationalist caucus declared for Mr. Hughes. The caucus had been urged to throw him overboard, and had been told by anti-Hughes critics that to do so would also mean throwing overboard his troublesome Pledge No. 2. Instead of that, the caucus, resisting all temptation to kick the sick lion, specifically readopted both Mr. Hughes and his pledge, and gave the Government a blank cheque with which to honour that embarrassing undertaking. Now the question arises: Is the pledge honoured? Does resignation absolve the pledge-giver? And, if it does, can the absolution still exist when, after the lapse of a day or two, the same pledge-giver leads back the same Government to the same responsible posts? Morally, these questions may provoke difference of opinion, but it seems that constitutionally Mr. Hughes has paid the debt. His debtor Government is dead, and constitutionally a new Government has been born. But the practical and patriotic Australian whose soul does not delight in constitutionalism will not be satisfied with anything out of text-books. The question he will ask himself is whethei the war will be best served by maintaining in office a Hughes-Cook majority Government, or by experimenting with a Tudor minority Government, or by another general election. The Tudor idea he fancies least of all. Most of all he would like to clean the Federal Parliament off the slate, but he fears—and not without reason—the bad effect on war-winning of a fresh disturbance in the already overcharged political atmosphere of the Commonwealth. So a Hughes-Cook Government may remain as a lesser x evil. There is, indeed, nothing that can unseat it save a defeat in Parliament, which cannot be inflicted .without a landslide in the Nationalist Party, and at present there is of such a development no outward sign. Questionable as the tactics of Mr. Hughes may have been, the surprising solidity of his support in caucus is the outstanding factor in the situation now presented. Its importance is not lessened by the fact that it has probably been dictated less by love of his leadership than by a shrinking fear of the alternative.