A POLITICAL TRIANGLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 75, 30 March 1939, Page 8

A POLITICAL TRIANGLE

National insurance is again in the crucible in Australia, owing to the insistence of the Country Party, which demands the reduction of the recently-passed Commonwealth National Insurance Act to a measure for dealing with national health and family medical benefits. The new Bill has still to be drafted, but in the meantime it is assumed that the new age benefits will be dropped, and that the will of the Country Party will prevail, so far as Cabinet and caucus are concerned. Parliament, however, is a different factor. Numerically the Lyons Government (representing the United Australia Party and the Country Party) is far weaker in the Senate than in the House of Representatives. Normally the Government's majority in the Senate is only two. Will a reversion of policy—a reversion that could be

carried only at the cost of the resignation of the Attorney-General, Mr. Menzies: —find endorsement in a Chamber in which the Government's majority is so slender that one defection would appear to be fatal?

The alliance of the United Australia and Country Parties is under fire not only in the Federal arena, but in the Mother State (New South Wales). The Lyons Government (Federal) has no by-election troubles impending, but the Stevens Government (New South Wales) has just fallen at one of these hurdles and is about to face another. In New South Wales there are various "border-line" electorates that have sometimes been Labour and sometimes not; and it happens that death has removed the sitting members (both U.A.P.) of two of these electorates, Hurstville and Waverley. Hurstville was lost on March 18, and it is feared that the Government may also lose Waverley. Hurstville was, and Waverley^will be, a triangular fight, with a U.A.P. candidate facing a Lang Labour candidate and also a candidate of the other State Labour Party, called, after its leader, the Heffron Party. The Heffron Party won Hurstville, and thus raised its membership in the New South Wales Assembly to 5, against Lang Labour's 24.

If the Heffron Party wins Waverley from the Government, it will still have only one-quarter of Lang Labour's membership. There is some suggestion, however, that the moral effect of another Heffron victory over Lang Labour and the Government might disturb the loyalty and solidity of the Lang phalanx. Until the Lang-Heffron conflict comes to an end, Labour "solidarity" in New South Wales cannot exist; and this issue is of strategical importance in the immediate future of both State and Commonwealth. The political futures of the various parties, and of national insurance in New South Wales, remain obscure—and overshadowed by a greater obscurity, "war or peace?"