HUMOURS OF PARTYISM

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 135, 10 June 1933, Page 12

HUMOURS OF PARTYISM

It is evident that the further the tariff wedge is driven between the Country Party and the United Australian. Party the better the chance of Labour's regaining ascendancy in the Federal sphere. The irony of the Senate division reported from Canberra is that there were sufficient Country Party and U.A.P. dissenters from Government policy to compel the Government to rely on the votes of the protectionist Labour Senators (who themselves are otherwise in two camps), The cleverly I worded amendment that drew behind it Country Party Senators and seven U.A.P. Senators also sent the warring Labour factions into the same lobby with the Government— the Government that they dislike perhaps not quite so much as they dislike each other. In the year 2000 there may be a museum devoted to the system called Democracy, and such a division as that recorded in the Senate will be reproduced with labels and explanatory notes, as showing how peoples were governed and how tariffs were made in the semi-Dark Ages. In the Senate the | Country Party trumpeters merely sounded the note that import' duties on British goods, raised without a Tariff Board report, should revert, and the walls of the official Jericho trembled so much that their enemies had to hold them up. All this will be noted by Mr. John Lang, that modern Joshua who, according to | his bosom friend, Mr. A. C. Willis, watches from Sydney all the Canberra events, with a view to jumping from State into Federal politics.