DAY IN PARLIAMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 96, 20 October 1937, Page 12

DAY IN PARLIAMENT

MORE ABOUT THE BUDGET Statistics are beginning to play an important part now in any reference to the attenuated debate on the Financial Statement in the House of Representative. For ten sitting days ; the House has had to listen to a bewildering variety of arguments presented in a bewildering variety of ways, and while there have been necessary interruptions to this highly important discussion, it has so far broken all distance records this session. When the House rose at 10.30 o'clock last night, the forty-second speaker was still unfinished. Of the contributors to the debate, twenty-three have been Government members, seventeen Opposition, and two Independents, and on the assumption that each speaker had his full hour and a little more-some of them had a lot morer-about two full days have been occupied in talk about everything except the Labour Government's second Budget, which started it off in the first place. Mr. J. A. Lee, Under-Secretary for Housing, was the first on yesterday's bill, and naturally he had quite a little to say about housing. The only Minister to speak was the Hpn. D. U. Sullivan, and his attention was devoted to a large extent to the question of industrial and commercial matters. He touched on chain stores, and denied that the Government was entering the retail business; he spokei about the chemist business and said; there was no intention on the part of| the Government to run the chemists'j shops; and he had something to say to a Canterbury member about the latter's attitude on the wheat question, which to Canterbury members is 1 something almost more sacred than! R. A. Wright (Wellington Suburbs) covered a wide range of topics! in his speech, and had something statistical to say about minority seats in the House. He also touched on what he described as the hidden threat to the freedom of the Press. Mr. A. G. Hultquist (Government, Bay of Plenty) touched Mr. Wright in rather a sensitive spot in his speech immediately after, when he drew Mr. Wright's highly indignant denials of the suggestion that he (Mr. Wright) had anything to do with the social credit movement. (The report of the debate appears on page 10.)