THE CLOSURE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21598, 19 March 1932, Page 10

THE CLOSURE.

The system of the closure has now, not temporarily only but permanently, been added to the rules under which the debates in the House of Representatives are conducted. The circumstance is not one that calls for any expression of satisfaction. If there had been no abuse of the rules of debate, as there was last year and as there has been this session, there would have been no legitimate excuse for the introduction of a drastic measure which itself is liable to be abused in a most tyrannical manner. When it is said that the

House must remain master of its own procedure and that 'it must possess the right of preventing a sheer waste of time on the part of a minority, such as has been witnessed this week, in offering a prolonged but necessarily futile resistance to proposals that are favoured by a majority, the argument in support of the institution of the closure is fully stated. A waste of time in the Parliament of the Dominion has unfortunately been a common experience in the past. And time costs money. Every day for which Parliament sits involves the taxpayer in a heavy outlay. This may not have seemed to matter a great deal in the days of abounding prosperity and of comfortable surpluses despite lavish expenditure. All Governments have connived at a waste of- time in debate. There has never been any satisfactory reason for the consumption of a fortnight or even three weeks every session in the discussion of the Address-in-Reply and for the consumption of a similar period in the discussion of the Financial Statement. But no Government has concerned itself in the past with the limitation of debate on either of these occasions. If members of the House of Commons were to participate in fulldress debates in relatively the same numbers as members of the House of Representatives in New Zealand have done, the British Parliament would be continuously in session and its function as a legislative assembly would be completely paralysed. The British Government, however, having control of the Order Paper, as all Governments have, allots a certain number of days for each important discussion, and, generally speaking, the various parties make their own arrangements as to the speakers who will present their views within the prescribed limits of time. This reasonable practice admits of an adequate expression of opinion upon any question that comes under discussion. An argument does not gain force from being repeated over and over again by a large number of members, as so frequently happens in our ‘Parliament. If the debates were regulated here as they are in the House of Commons there would have been no need for the introduction of the closure. This instrument for the curtailment of debate has been operated so unjustly in Australian Parliaments, in which it is freely applied to prevent legitimate discussion, that. Ave have viewed Avith some uneasiness the amendment of the Standing Orders of the House of Representatives so as to provide fox’ the use of it in our own Parliament. But the Opposition had shown itself so determined to abuse the ordinary forms of the House that it certainly provoked the action which the Government, with the support of the majority of the -members, has taken. And the deliberate obstruction Avhich it has offered to the passage of the Arbitration Bill, culminating, as Avill be seen in our news columns this morning, in a very long and unfortunately heated sitting of the House, has supplied a justification for the use of the closure.