THE SESSION OF 1900. A Mixed Record.

Free Lance, Volume I, Issue 17, 27 October 1900, Page 6

THE SESSION OF 1900. A Mixed Record.

IT has been observed that the session which closed on Saturday was more remarkable for the three million words contributed by the proceedings to the vast bulk of Hansard. In which statement there is truth, so far as the three million words are concerned. The first conclusion for the public to draw, therefore, is that the session must be remarkable for a great deal of wasted time. No doubt the business done required some talking, but no possible business that can be mentioned could ever justify the awful loquacity of the record. The evil has grown, is growing, and will grow until it strangles the usefulness of Parliamentary discussion. Strangers observe it with astonishment at the first glance, as witness the British M.P. last year, who, after sitting a while in the House of Kepresentatives, said there was "too much bally jaw." The difficulty which strangers do not see is that the waste of time is caused chiefly by minorities which revenge themselve for numerical inferiority by superiority of jaw power. It is a manifest abuse of the power given to minorities by the forms of Parliament to safeguard their interests not to enable them to gratify spleen. The time has arrived for the power to be curtailed. # • • This is thought to be the last session of the big surplus series. It certainly was the session in which the consequence of that long series was reached in the remission of the taxation on some necessaries of life. About that remission the most remarkable thing was not the relief it gave generally, S3 much as the split it produced for a while in the Ministerial ranks. So much so that the session will be known rather as that of the insurrection of the " Boxers " than the session of Tariff remission. The change in the Tariff made good the Ministerial promise, at a cost somewhat disproportionate to the result achieved for the public benefit. • • * In fact, the session will be well known by the effect it had upon the discipline in the ministerial ranks. The disturbance arising out of the Tariff stands accompanied in the record by the equally grave disturbance over the Ministerial and Governor's salaries, by the unexpected proceedings in connection with the Private Industrial Schools Bill, and

by the strange spectacle of Ministers going into opposite Lobbies on a Government measure, viz., the Mining Bill, the question being the reduction in one Is 'and only of the fee for the miner's right. The Premier might very well refer to the session as " the winter of our discontent." It is a shrewd guess of the Lance cartoonist this week. « * * Ifc was a session of prodigiously bulky intention, actually attempted in face of the Ministerial statement that the Premier's impaired health required the remedy of a short, uneventful session. The result, of course, was that the Premier went through one of the hardest sessions in his arduous career. The consolidation measures were useful, particularly the Municipal Corporations Act, which is in some respects a new departure in local government. The Native question has at last been brought to experimental touch. Authority has been given for a Million Loan, and the question of Eailway Extension and Public Works has been put on a better basis than it has been on for fifteen years. But these things and other useful ones could have been done in half the time devoted to them. Local Government, Licensing, Referendum, and Elective Executive would have justified much talk, but they were not given the chance. On the whole one looks at the three million words and wonders what half of them could possibly have been about.