LEGISLATORS’ DUTY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 226, 23 August 1945, Page 5

LEGISLATORS’ DUTY

RESPONSIBILITY STRESSED. WELLINGTON, Aug. 23. Vital changes radically altering the way of life of the community, amounting almost to revolution in a past way of thought and life, should take place only after the change in question had been explicitly placed before the people in a form which showed that the will of the majority, addressed to that particular change, was clear and unequivocal, said Mr W. J. Sim, K.C., president of the National Party, in the course of his address at the annual | conference of tlie party. I An earlier generation, he said, understood and applied this principle upon the question of national prohibition, deciding that it must be explicitly voted on, and carried by more than a bare majority. Democracy, if it were to survive, could not mean that the lives of its constituents, and their way of life were to be the plaything of any group that for the moment had managed to capture, by all the means available for tlie purpose, the control of the legislative machine. It would be the object of the National Party’s endeavours to respect this principle. It would further seek to curtail the interference by the Legislature with the ordinary affairs of New Zealand men and women—in other words, to call a halt to the present tormenting of New Zealanders by legislation and regulation, with consequential inspectors and their inquisitions. Akin to the responsibility of the Legislature not to interfere drastically with the self-chosen ways of New Zealanders and their property without clear authority, fairly obtained from the whole country, there was also the principle that legislators at all times carried the responsibility of being representatives of all the people and not merely of a section of them. In tlie High Court of Parliament they had a responsibility in this respect akin to the responsibility of a Supreme Court Judge. The duty to act in a representative capacity was, as lie understood the position, the constitutional position of a legislator. The conception of a Loft (or any other) wing of a caucus outside Parliament dictating to responsible Ministers and the representatives of the people . was wholly at variance with British ideas of representative government. If it continued it was the death blow to Democracy.