The Tale of Two Sessions

Southland Times, Issue 11655, 9 February 1891, Page 2

The Tale of Two Sessions

+. TO THE EDITOR. | Sio, — I have watched with great interest the correspondence in your columns regarding the first transaction of the new Parlia- | ment. It U a good «ign that public opinion ■hould have expressed itself vehemently on a question involving so flagrant a lapse of Ministerial and Parliamentary morality. The lamentable thing is to find the ethics of the Government and its following, not, as they should be, in the lead, but infinitely behind the moral sense of the general community. Perhaps you may think that the last word may well have been said on this miserable subject ; but if so, I hare another opinion. I question indeed if the last word ever will have been spoken until New Zealand politics shall have ceased to be. A new Government and a new party have been called into_existeuce, shouting loudly the cries of purity and economy ; y«t their first act has been one of spoliation for their own benefit to which — although not without their shaiy pages — the annals of New Zealand do not afford a parallel. The act will prove to have been also a suicidal one. It is impossible that any government or any party should survive the disgrace of having plundered the public purse as Mr Ballance and his followers have openly done. It is impossible that the working men of the colony, who for the first time have had members of their own class in the House of Representatives, should forgive the stigma that these have brought upon their order and on the first Labour Parliament. It needs only, in truth, that the fact of the majority having voted themselves one hundred and fifty pounds each of the public money for having done literally nothing iv a week's time— it needs only that this fact should lodge and simmer for a while in the mind of the community, in order to settle the ultimate fate of every one concerned in the transaction. Mr Balance may fancy himself *ecure behind the majority of which he has made so shameful and high-handed a use, but I have such faith in righteous retribution as to believe that Nemesis cannot be very far off. I decline to argue a question that must be so clear to every mind not debased by the exigencies and sophistry of Party ; but the one flimsy plea in justification of what has been done may as well be noticed. It was the apology of Mr Ballance and others that their party was not responsible for Parliament having been called together last month. But what was that to the purpose 1 Parliament had met, and the point of patriotism was to make the best of the situatiou. There was not a shadow of reason why a short session should not be held and an adjournment made until the usual time of assembling after March. Mr Ballance's policy ought to have been ready, if it was not ; and we know that Sir Harry Atkinson was prepared to meet Parliament a fortnight after he took the reigns of power. The choice of a prorogation instead of an adjournment was simply a device by which to bribe and reward the supporters of the administration, and a device so transparent that the whole country sees through it with perfect clearness. There is just one good likely to accrue from this wretched business. It will have opened the eyes that were not before enlightened to the intolerable mischief of party government. If the country is to be able to endure a Parliament, it will have to be one managed on other than party linos. Plunder and misgovernment are the results sure to continue if the present methods be persisted in, and the mind of the people ought to be made up that they shall speedily cease. In the meantime I trust that every member who has come back to his constituents with the discredit and disgrace upon him of having voted for an unearned honorarium will be made to endure the humiliation that his position deserves. — I am, etc., An Indignant Elector.