The Evening Star MONDAY, JUNE 14, 1926. THE CABINET.

Evening Star, Issue 19275, 14 June 1926, Page 6

The Evening Star MONDAY, JUNE 14, 1926. THE CABINET.

Ax embarrassment of talent, Mr Coates has explained, has been his chief difficulty in the long task, now completed, of reconstructing his Ministry. The assurance is the conventional one to bo given in such circumstances, and it may make some poor balm for the feelings of those members who have been disappointed in their hopes of preferment. To others it will be more polite than convincing. Is the Reform Party such a galaxy of stars that almost any of them would shed lustre on a Ministerial position? There is a strong suggestion to the contrary in the fact that, though ho has taken twelve months to re-form his Cabinet, Mr Coates has not found substitutes for two or three of its members who had failed to impress the public with any appearance of brilliance. To have done that before the elections might have been the extreme of harshness and imprudent from a party point of view, because the members so marked as tried and found wanting would have run tho most serious risk of losing their scats. One would think, however, that it might have been done with advantage immediately after tho polls, if the material for Cabinet-making at the Prime Minister’s command had been as rich as he describes it. Every day that it was not done, following that beginning of a new political period, would make the task more difficult to perform. Mr Coates, in reshaping his Government, has not sacrificed any of Iris earliest team, and that tolerance suggests inevitably that ho was by no means sure that ho had better men to supplant them. From the ranks of his own party he could only have made substitutions, in any case, by dispensing with men whom his predecessor had preferred to those within his range of new selection, and to go outside his party would have seemed a preposterous thing, by all usual canons of political judgment, in view of Reform's new, triumphant majority—a sacrifice unredeemed by any advantage to party. As it has been finally constituted Mr Coates’s Cabinet is big, but it does not as yet present any other claims to be impressive, in numbers it goes back to tho size of the war-time National Government, which naturally was of unusual dimensions, being representative of both the political parties, besides having to deal with abnormal general conditions. If Mr Guthrie is to act still as a member of the executive without portfolio this Ministry will bo even larger than the National Government, with fourteen members as compared with thirteen. Mr Coates has spread his portfolios very thinly, in comparison with, the usual custom, but that may be altogether a good thing. Prime Ministers, more especially, in the past have been loaded with too many departments; Air Coates should have more time to think than some of his predecessors have had, and to give a load to his team. There are not many members of this Cabinet who have tho reputation of being strong Ministers, and to an unusual degree it consists of untried men, whoso coruscations had been less than remarkable in a subordinate capacity. The choice of Air Williams, of tho Bay of Plenty, for the important portfolio of Public Works makes tho last of Air Coates’s appointments. The chief reputation which ho has hitherto borne has been that of a “ good sport,” and one of the most popular members of tho House, who makes loss demand on ‘ Hansard ’ than almost any other. If he talks little in the House, possibly he has thought tho more. j-j-c has been chairman of the Native Affairs Committee, and, until he was first returned to Parliament six years ago, he was chairman of a county council in his electorate. His special qualification for his new position has been explained to be that he knows the backblocks and their needs, and, in the efforts for development of a Public Works Alinister, it is the backblocks that have first claim to be considered. But tho country will know more of Air Coates’s new Ministers by the time the session, which begins this week, is ended.