Evening Post. MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 1930. TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT?

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 48, 25 August 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 1930. TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT?

I The Legislative Council has sprung I a very pleasant surprise upon the country by its treatment of the Defence (Temporary) Amendment Bill. jSo much of the Council's time is spent in saying ditto to the House of Representatives that it is commonly supposed to have nothing else to do. But though its principal functions are those of a revising Chamber, and on important questions of policy on which the Government and the House have a clear mandate from the electors its constitutional duty is to follow the course which the House has taken at the instance of the Government, there is not the slightest ground for extending this obligation to a general subservience where the condition does not apply. There is, indeed, one class of ques- ; tions to which the Legislative Council is accustomed to pay far more attention than the House, and on which it takes a line of its own without, as a rule, provoking any clash. The ! parish pump usually seems to count i far more than the Empire in the i fierce party warfare of the popular Chamber. In the calmer air of the Council it is possible to observe a better proportion, and to devote to Imperial issues a more frequent and a more adequate attention than the pressure of domestic business permits them to receive. Though the parochialists fail to see it, military defence is an Imperial issue just as much as naval defence. It is also beyond question that neither the House nor the United Party received any authority whatever at the General Election for striking the deadly blow at our military defence system which was proposed by Mr. Cobbe's deplorable Bill. Constitutionally, therefore, the Legislative Council was free to deal with the Bill on its merits, and the country is indebted to Sir James Allen for the spirited lead that he gave his fellow-members and for the decisive' result. There is, indeed, nobody in the Council, or in the-House, or in the country who has a better right to be heard upon this question than Sir James Allen. Though his party was in Opposition when the compulsory military training was established by the Defence Act of 1909, there was only one other politician to whom the country was so much indebted for the passing of the measure, and that man was not a member of the Government which put it through. It was a strong popular agitation, of which the politicians were at first very shy, that induced Sir Joseph Ward, but on his own side in politics his late colleague, Mr. Robert M'Nab, had made an indispensable contribution to the agitation, and in the House Sir James Allen's enthusiasm was a greater force than Mr. Massey's more cautious attitude on the side of the Opposition. Sir James Allen's services in carrying throughout lhe War the portfolio of Defence are 100 well known to need more than a passing mention. For our present purpose his essential qualifications are that as an enthusiastic Volunteer he had for years done his best for the old system, and that as a Minister of Defence he acquired an unsurpassed experience of the value of the new one.

Moving the second reading of lhe Defence (Temporary) Amendment Bill, the Leader of the Legislative Council, Sir Thomas Sidey, packed into two sentences an amount of inaccuracy which could hardly have been exceeded in the space.

The main object was, he said, to effect a saving of £295,000.* There was no ground for any suggestion that the Compulsory. Military Service Act would be abandoned.

The reply to the first of these statements is that the economy is a matter not for a Bill but for the Estimates, with which the Council is not concerned; and we are actually^ told to-day that the rejection of this Bill will enable the Government to effect ever more rigid economies than those originally intended. We should be glad to think that Sir Thomas Sidey's second point—that there is no ground for the fear that compulsory training is to be abandoned—has a better foundation. But how can this assurance be reconciled with the whole attitude of the Minister of Defence to the problem, and in particular with his refusal to case the passage of his Bill through the House by any definite and positive declaration on the point? In reply to Mr. A. M. Samuel's cross-examination when the Bill was in Committee,

the Minister stated that the Bill would operate for one year only. "What the future would hold he could not say. The Government had been urged in many quarters to abolish training altogether, but the Government would not do that.

It is true that there is a denial here of the Government's intention to abolish the compulsory system, but on the other hand "what the future would hold he could not say." This may be Mr. Cobbe's way of saying that what the future has in store for the Government in this matter lies on the lap of the Labour Party, but we shall be very much surprised if it is not graciously pleased to relieve the Government from the painful necessity of abolishing the system "altogether" *8 the Minister says, as long as tfiey mtew rtie suspension of

it, like the renewal of the Mutiny Act in Great Britain from year to year. Is this to be the future policy of the Government, about which for the present neither Mr. Cobbe nor any of his colleagues dare to prophesy, except in the negative?

The Minister of Defence has, however, put an even more difficult hurdle in the way of his colleagues than a mere inability to say what the future has in store. He agrees with them in making economy the first ground for the change in the defence policy of the Government, but docs not agree with them in making it the only ground. In moving the second reading of the Bill in the House, Mr. Cobbe gave as a second reason for his change

the strong feeling' in favour of world-wide peace, and the opposition, to compulsory military service that had grown up in the last few years in most civilised countries.

Now, it is perfectly clear that "this strong feeling in favour of worldwide peace" and this "opposition to compulsory military service" cannot by any subtlety of reasoning be limited in their operation to a single year. They will be just as strong next year as they are now, and the Minister of Defence will have just as good ground for respecting these feelings then as he has now; and so "ad infinitum." The fact appears to be that Mr. Cobbe has definitely succumbed to pacifist influences, of which his colleagues have only agreed to make a temporary use in order to balance their Budget and retain office. We cannot see any other way of reconciling the contradictory references to which we have referred, and we suggest to the Government that if they do not wish to be permanently misunderstood they had better get a Minister of Defence who can talk defence and not pacifism. In the meantime, the country is deeply indebted to Sir James Alleri for his weighty attack upon this anti-Imperial measure, and to the Legislative Council for rejecting it decisively by 17 votes to 9.