THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 1948. THE BANKING BILL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26848, 12 August 1948, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 1948. THE BANKING BILL

The Labour Government of Australia lias suffered a cruel blow with the judgment of the High Court that the Bank Nationalisation Act is invalid. It took the taciturn Mr Chifley 42 words to outline his Government’s intention of taking over the trading banks: it required 700,000 words from his loquacious Attorney-general, Dr Evatt, to defend the Government’s scheme: and it has taken £75,000 of the Australian taxpayers’ money to protect their rights—for the principle in the Act affected every individual in the Commonwealth —against the unreasoning and predatory Moloch which Socialism in Australia has brought into being. The legal argument on the issue involved a mass of technicalities, and the High Court itself seems almost to have foundered in their intricacies, but the question in its essentials was clear enough and has been clearly answered. Constitutionally the Government is not empowered, in the judgment of the High Court, to extend its policy of nationalisation into trade and commerce in such a way as to interfere with the rights of the States—and of their citizens.

The prospect is that the Federal Government will appeal the case to the Privy Council, or it may stubbornly challenge the law and the people by drafting new empowering legislation. Mr Chifley, on his record, is more likely to choose one of these legalistic alternatives than to accept the verdict of the High Court, which was shown when the legislation was first brought down to be also the verdict of Australia, on his high-handed plan. There is one move—and the only fair and democratic one if he desires to proceed with the bank grab—which he will not make. That would be to submit the issue to the people of the Commonwealth. Mr Chifley has tried that once this year already, when a referendum • was taken on the Government’s proposal to make permanent,its control of rents, prices and charges, which had been approved by the States as an emergency measure.

The emphatic repudiation by the electorate of this proposal, which was rejected by overwhelming majorities even in the Labour-con-trolled States, represented the sort of popular defeat that a self-respect-ing Government could not suffer and desire to remain in office; but Mr Chifley’s stalwarts are made of stuff of a peculiar density and their reaction to a further blow cannot be expected to be normal obedience to the will, and the law of the people. It was urged by Mr Menzies when the Banking Bill was introduced last October that the honourable and straightforward course would be to let the people decide its fate. His appeal failed, and likewise his calm demonstration that if the Government desired merely what'it said it did in presenting the Bill, the control of banking policy, the Commonwealth Bank already possessed , that power as, in New Zealand, the Bank of New Zealand possesses it. The Socialists, in their wild and uncharted programmes, are not to be persuaded by logic nor restrained by fact.