STATISTICS OF PARLIAMENTARY SESSIONS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4208, 15 September 1874, Page 3

STATISTICS OF PARLIAMENTARY SESSIONS.

At the close of last session of Parliament, we published authorised statistics —the number of Bills passed, motions made, questions put, hours occupied, and so on. It may be interesting to compare the proceedings of other Colonial Parliaments, and of one—that of New South Wales—we have some particulars in the following remarks which appear in the Sydney Morning Herald : The Colony owes much to Parliamentary Government; but Parliamentary Government owes little to the proceedings of last session, which with one exception—thatof 1870-1 —was the longest, and pre-eminently the most wearisome and barren. An immense amount of work was attempted, but precious little was done. Whole days, w» may even say weeks and months have been consumed in idle talk; and it is perfectly marvellous that any assembly of sane men should consider it necessary that so much should be said upon any topic before anything whatever is allowed to be done. It would not be difficult to point to some of the principal causes of Parliamentary loquacity, nor indeed to designate the more hardened offenders. The task, however, is a bootless one. The average duration of the 158 days on which the Legislative Assembly met was six hours and thirty-three minutes ; and of the total number of hours (1036) fifty-nine were spent after midnight. The result of all this, so far as the officers of the House are concerned, is a prodigious amount of the most painstaking labor ; and many of the ten thousand and odd entries which they have made upon the “Votes and Proceedings” may be found serviceable by stump-orators and roads-ahd-bridges men in the ensuing electioneering campaign. The result, so far as legislation is concerned, has been sufficiently proclaimed already. We should suppose that the curiosity of the gentlemen who assemble in Macquarie Street is remarkably strong, for there have been nearly two thousand questions asked, many of them consisting of about ten or a dozen sub-questions ; and so keen was their appetite for information that more than a hundred addresses and orders for papers were made in the vain endeavor to satisfy it. The inquisitive faculty also found scope in the investigations remitted to between twenty and thirty select committees. Nearly a score of them were committees upon private Bills ; but still the information thus collected, if surveyed in the bulk, is stupendous and truly formidable. Mr. Parkes appears to have been smitten with the garrulity of one hen. member in particular who, he says, has performed the remarkable feat of delivering more than four hundx-ed speeches during the last session. The name of Ithe hero has not been vouchsafed, but it is possible he may yet be immortalised. It may perhaps be well to bear in mind that members of Parliament ought to bo judged not simply by how much they say, but also by what they do. If it wore possible to count up how often and how long each man spoke, there would still be considerable difficulty in determining how much importance ought to be attached to his utterances, the canons of the Government and the Opposition being so very different. We cannot pretend to fix any standard by which the conduct of the people’s representatives can be accurately measured, for it very often happens that bon. gentlemen speak one way and vote another. Nor is it easy to judge them by what they have done, for we find that many gentlemen are constantly doing good by stealth, and, wo may hope, blushing to find it fame. There may be no necessary connection between the repair of a road in some remote part of the territory, and the vote of a representative in Parliament, although somehow or other the two things have come to bo almost inseparably associated in the minds of the great body of the electors, and the relation as one of cause and

effect is sometimes delicately hinted even by honorable gentlemen themselves. Under the circumstances, if. not the only at any rate a long way the best course open, to any constituency which wishes to ascertain how it has been represented in Parliament, is to appeal to the records of the House itself. There have been 118 divisions in the House, and 188 divisions in Committee of the Whole, so that according to this scale, the highest number of marks which any hon. member could score was 306. 1 On three occasions, the House was adjourned by the Speaker for want of a quorum; and it was counted-out seventeen times.