NATIONAL CABINET: ONE ONLY!

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 26, 30 July 1940, Page 6

NATIONAL CABINET: ONE ONLY!

_^> — Australians are taking rather a long time, to settle the, question of a National Government. They seem to feel that the problem of how to gather all the political parties into one Cabinet is not solved by gathering them all into two Cabinets; nor would it be solved by forming a National War Council. The Australians already have seven Governments and Parliaments in normal times of peace; and the addition of a few more Federal Cabinets and War Councils would appear to be too much of a good thing—in fact, it would in that respect resemble inflation of the currency. Cabinets and one pound notes have a value proportioned to their scarcity; and no country's problems are solved, in war or in peace, by reducing the scarcity unduly. There is, therefore, still a hope that the Australians, although they make haste slowly, will in the finish achieve something worth while, in the shape of one War Cabinet, not two, or three, or four. There is reason to believe that both the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, and the Labour Leader, Mr. Curtin, though handicapped by unseen political pulls, are both struggling manfully to squeeze their political quart (some of which is froth) into a really national pint pot. . A sample of the froth is a revival —strange in these times —of the Sydney-Melbourne struggle for political influence. Sydney revives the old charge of the centralising of Government affairs in Melbourne to the detriment of the Federal capital of Canberra, in New South Wales. This is just the kind of domestic bickering in which the Rt. Hon. W. M. Hughes's gift for cynical utterance shines, and he could not resist the temptation of remarking that some of his Cabinet colleagues, when in Sydney, look like "foreigners in a strange land . . . and quickly fly back to their burrows in Melbourne." This figure of speech pictures the Ministers as mutton-birds—but does not the whole episode resemble fiddling while Rome burns? Another diversion from the National Cabinet task is provided by the journalistic schism in which figure Sir Keith Murdoch and Mr. Fink. But, on the other hand, Mr. Menzies and Mr. Curtin are adhering to their thorny task; and the former's offer to the Labour Party of five or possibly six portfolios, including the control of the new Federal Department of Labour, marks a step forward, the importance of which cannot be obscured by the public discussion of more lively and less relevant topics. The "Sydney Morning Herald" comments: Mr. Curtin's response to the Prime Minister's appeal indicates that he is no more desirous than Mr. Menzies of "playing politics" in this supreme emergency, but that he is torn between a patriotic urge to lend a hand in the work of speeding-up the war programme and misgivings about the attitude of elements within his party. None of the 'objections to co-operation which he has raised, perfunctorily rather than from evident conviction, has any real substance. In fact, they strengthen rather than weaken the hope that at long last an Australian National Cabinet—just one National Cabinet—will emerge. If it is true —as has heen alleged —that the genius of the twentieth century is for mass production, the multitude of politicians and Parliaments in Australia is perhaps understandable. But those people who still hold to the old idea that production should be qualitative rather than quantitative will wish Mr. Menzies and Mr. Curtin success in their effort to compress the political wisl--dom of Australia into a single National Government. The British War Cabinet of five members is an example which no doubt the Australians will hardly attain, but if they merely reach that degree of concentration implied by Mr. Menzies's offer to Mr. Curtin, they will still show the light of example to certain other members of the British Commonwealth, not excepting New Zealand.