PARTY POLITICS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18255, 25 November 1933, Page 12

PARTY POLITICS

BISHOP CROTTY’S ATTACK j. - r, ' ■ “THE OLD PARLIAMENTARY HEN”

.. itu WAOGA (&.S .W,), Nov. 14. Bishop Grotty, .of , Bathurst, in a public address in Wagga. attacked the present political party system, and suggested that representative men sit ting round a table, or perhaps before nil altar, should cyqlvft a new systeiit in which politics, economics, and the Church would each play a part in the salvation of the community. Hp said that party politics were apt to kill or confuse everything they touched. Under thp present partysystem, the people were : bereft from the start of collective views. Truth could not be served when a, great national leader had to have. his ear to the ground; he needed to have his eyes to the hills. Yet that was preciselv what he could not do. lie was a politician. What , the party system needed was radical surgery. Politicians were victims of a system which needed cleaning. Recently, New South Wales set put to reform the Upper House, an opportunity to obtain a reform long overdue and a really representative dispassionate Chamber of political review. “You know the result,” Bishop Crotty declared. “It represents probably as good a result as practical statesmanship in our unregencrate system of party politics could achieve. Existing Houses elect a new on<V The old Parliamentary hen obviously has been sick, barren, and well-stricken for years, yet she, wonderful to tell, provides the matrix of her own salvation, and has to lay herself, poor dear, the blessed egg that lias to heal her.” Bishop Crotty urged that the Church should have a greater part in all phases of, the ordered life.of society. The division of life into watertight compartments was the vice and bane of modern life and thinking. Religion, economics, and politics had all been seetionalised. Society, consequently, had become atomised, disorganised, sundered. hopelessly, Economics needed taking up into politics ip the widest sense and made part of a great new art of social living. Both needed taking up into religion till they became great acts of worship. There were those who would keep religion out of politics, and exclude politics as they would exclude everything that mattered from religion’s empire and control. That point of view was tantamount to the contention that God must be hounded out of 80 per pent of modern life.