Evening Post. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1928. COUNTRY BEFORE PARTY

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 112, 16 November 1928, Page 8

Evening Post. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1928. COUNTRY BEFORE PARTY

The conclusion of the Prime Minister's brief and manly speech on Wednesday night for which some less manly opponents had not the decency to give him a fair hearing was as follows:— We must accept the will of the people. They have the right to judge. They have judged. I accept their judgment, and I only hope that, whatever happens, Parliament will put our country before partisanship and carry on. "Cheers, hoots, and loud dissent" were, according to our report, the response of the crowd to this straightforward utterance. The cheers it is easy to understand, for when a man "plays the game" in the hour of defeat it is in accordance with the instincts and traditions of our race to acknowledge it. and for those who have defeated him to be particularly generous in their acknowledgment. But what were the hoots about? and from what was anybody called upon to express "loud dissent"? We may take it for granted that in cold blood the dissentients will not attempt to justify their action,-and that, without abating one jot of their hostility to the Reform Government, they will agree with an overwhelming majority of their fellow-countrymen in recognising, in the very words which brought their tumult to a climax the spirit which should enable Parliament to find a way of solution of an exceedingly difficult problem. Every sober-minded citizen must surely concur with Mr. Coates in hoping that, whatever happens, Parliament will put our country before partisanship and carry on. Though the precise conditions of the problem with which Parliament has to deal have yet to be determined. : its fundamental features are definitely fixed. The very generous facilities which were granted to electors some years ago for voting outside their own districts, but appear to have been only recently realised in full measure, have introduced one element of uncertainty which did not exist in the old days. There are some 50,000 votes of this kind to be still brought into the reckoning, and in some cases the number of those outstanding votes is more than ten times the majority of the candidates who topped the poll on Wednesday. There are about ■ten electorates where the result may be reversed by these votes. The proportion of Independents is also larger than usual. Including the solitary representative of the Country Party there- are six of them, but from these the member for Dunedin Central will doubtless be taken to. fill the Speaker's Chair again. Even the five remaining Independents, counting as ten in a division, will be a formidable force in a Parliament where the parties are so evenly balanced. But after allowing to any of the parlies the utmost possible luck both with the Independents and in the ten doubtful constituencies, a working majority seems- to be quite beyond the reach of any of them. If such a solution were possible, the party system could be left to pursue its ordinary course. It is because that solution is out of the question that the Prime Minister's call to a higher patriotism than that of party comes in, and the call of course applies at least as strongly to his own party as to any other. It will necessarily be for the Government to make the first move, and there can be little doubt what that move will be. Under the two-party system the natural course for a Government to take which was decisively defeated at the polls was to resign. There was no point in wasting time and money or summoning Parliament to repeat a vote of noconfidence which the sovereign people had unequivocally carried already. But in those clays a decisive defeat at the polls was necessarily unequivocal because the majority which declared its want of confidence in the Government did so by declaring its confidence in the Opposition. Under the three-party system the position is not so simple. A Government may be decisively defeated by a vote, which cannot possibly be treated as a vote of confidence in either of the other two parties. Such was the position of the Baldwin Government after the General Election of 1923. With only 258 seats in a House of 615, the Government was only one short of 100 behind the combined strengths of Labour1 (191), the Liberals (159), and the Independents (7). In passing it may be noted that the position of the British Parliament at that time was very like what may be the ultimate position of our new Parliament, for, reduced to a New Zealand scale, the comparative strength of the British parties was,- approximately:—^Conservatives, 35; Liberals, 20; Labour, 25. But Mr. Baldwin, though decisively defeated, did not resign. It • was not for him to take the responsibility of suggesting that either of the smaller parties could command the confidence of the House. He therefore called Parliament together, and when the Liberals supported the Labour Party's noconfidence motion his course was clear. On the present occasion Mr. Coates appears to have an even stronger reason than Mr. Baldwin had for leaving the responsibility to Parliament. In an interview reported to-day, Sir Joseph Ward

emphatically repudiutcs thr: !Sii;.^(!H« tion that there has been any timlerstanding between his own party and the Labour Party, but almost immediately after the General Election of 1924 the British Liberal leaders took the responsibility of declaring that they would vote to put the Conservatives out and the Labour Party in. It must, unfortunately, be admitted that Sir Joseph Ward committed' himself in his speech at Invercargill to putting the Government out at any cost. He even went so iar as to complain of the audacity of Reform supporters who wauled to know how his party would vote on \ a no-confidence motion. That, he said, is clumsy i\\\A supreme audacity. What wius'n you «^'f I know what I'd do. Dimi"! yih; !V,Uik i I would be a frightful hyjwvUo u\ ' realising the way she* couutry :.s U'-«v£ i managed. I didn't vote to i>'.li i\\v lU\- : vernnieiit our? I\i voto wish Vw)- ] land like a shot. This is certainly a very thorough* going declaration against the lio\rro« ment. but it falls far short of Mv, Asquith's undertaking to support n Labour Government after the Conservative Government had been ejected, nor can we suppose that Sir Joseph Ward would for a moment contemplate such a course. It is also to be noted that even on the negative point of joining Labour to eject the Government the United Party will not be unanimous. But, as the United Party will now become the Opposition, what is needed to bring the case into line with the British precedent is a declaration from Mr. H. E. Holland that he will both turn the Reform Government out and put a United Government in. Such a possibility is also beyond serious contemplation. It seems at any rate clear that, as there is no. other party leader who could be possibly said to command the confidence of Parliament or of die country, it is Mr. Coates's duty to meet Parliament as Prime Minister at die earliest practicable opportunity and to leave the fate of his Government in its hands. And in' the meantime we trust that not only the leaders but the rank and file of both the non-Socialist parties will do a deal of hard thinking in order by mutual concessions based on the principle of putting country before party to find a way out of the deadlock without another General Election.