CREAKING BUT INTACT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23691, 24 December 1938, Page 22

CREAKING BUT INTACT

AUSTRALIAN CABINET'S TRIALS MR LYONS IN HAVEN OF RECESS (From Our Own Correspondent) SYDNEY, Dec. 16. The Federal Government, creaking but intact, has floundered into a < three-months' parliamentary recess; thus closing a session which, beginning shortly before the Czechoslovaks crisis reached its climax in September, was marked by drama to its dying hours, when the national insurance scheme squabble almost wrecked the Cabinet. This Federal session was probably the most eventful since the tense days of the Scullin Administration in 1931. The Government survived, political observers are satisfied, only because threatening events 1 came in a sequence so favourable to the Government that a tense situation responded to the undoubted diplomatic skill of the Prime Minister (Mr Lyons). Many people were predicting that there would be another election early next year as a sequel to Cabinet differences, but Mr Lyons »xtricated himself from one difficult position after another. Events were always going to end the Government, but never did. Though the demand is for firm national leadership, Mr Lyons has not given the lead that the nation has been expecting, but at the moment it is tact, rather than an uncompromising stand, that it keeping the Government parties together. Mr Lyons possesses an indefinable power of persuasion which is invariably reserved for the party room. On two or three occasions recently, when hostile forces were growing within his own ranks, he entered the party room to meet a challenge to his leadership and left with a vote of confidence and assurance of loyal suDport., The Wakefield (South Australia) by-election, rendered necessary by the death of Mr Charles Hawker in the Keeyma airliner disaster, was the final dash of bitterness in the Government cup of disappointment. The seat had been held by a nonLabour member since the inauguration of federation. The Premier of South Australia (Mr R. L. Butler) resigned from the State Parliament to contest an apparently safe seat. Mr McHugh, a Labour candidate, and Mr Quirk, an Independent, opposed him. Mr Butler polled slightly more first preference votes than Mr , McHugh, but the majority of Mr Quirk's second preferences favoured Mr McHugh. Mr Butler blamed for his defeat the recriminations and bickerings in the Federal Cabinet. These probably helped the Labour candidate, but Mr Butler has forgotten that his own State Government was rattled by a wave of Independents' successes in its last election, and the solid vote for Mr Quirk was merely a continuation of that feeling. Still, . although one by-election swallow does not make a political summer, the Government has cause . for concern at the position in which it finds itself. The legislation to establish a home-consumption price for wheat, the report on the Kyeema disaster, and the national insurance issue, all of which were potentially dangerous, came within a few days of the recess, and the Government was thus able to escape having an issue forced on those subjects. But the danger, well-informed people consider, has only been postponed, and serious developments are predicted when Parliament is called together again, probably at the end of March. Although expectations at present are that interesting developments will occur then, it is doubtful whether even the members' dissatisfaction and the clash of interests in the Government will force an election during 1939. The largest party in Parliament is still the "No-election" Party. The chief threat to the Government comes not from the Labour Opposition, which is extraordinarily weak in its attacks, but from within the Government's own ranks. The dispute over national insurance has only been patched up, and there are strong doubts whether the amendments that the Government proposes to make will placate the hostile section. Dangerous elements in the situation are actuated by the clash of interests between United Australia Party and United Country Party interests. Many U.A.P. members dislike the increasing penetration of the Country Party into the Government and resent many of its demands as arrogant.