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Evening Star, Issue 14638, 7 August 1911, Page 4

The community will await with keen interest whatever explanation £569 *S 6cJ. the Government may have to offer regarding the payment (by way of " unauthorised " expenditure) of a very substantial eum of money to a Dunedin firm of solicitors in connection with the drafting of licensing legislation. The amount is almost staggering, and we have heard it remarked that there are many capable lawyers in the- Dominion who would be glad to draft all the. legislation of the session for an honorarium of similar proportions. That, however, is not the meet material point. The principles at issue might be as effectively illustrated by a modest payment of "six and eightpence " as by such largess as ie represented in the gocdly figures at the head of this article. The salient considerations are, first, that the country- pays adequate salaries to the staff of a presumably competent Law-drafting Department, who, wetake it, ehould be able to put, the Government's proposals concerning licensing, as well as other matters, in their proper frame; and, secondly, that the lawyer whoso cervices have- been t?o liberally (albeit unauthorisedly) acknowledged is one of the meet notoriously partisan, as regards the licensing question, in the whole Dominion. It may be suggested, perhaps, that theeo legal services wore rendered at the time when the two bodies of extremists "trade" and Prohibitionist—were trying to formulate a measure on a basis of where is the "tr^-'" hiv.ys bill of c«U? £vr> in circumstances, moreover, tr: ( reason why tiie functions (;. the Law-drafting Department fchould have been delegated to external agencies. Assuredly there is a prima facie case for the Government to answer.