PARLIAMENT'S CRITICISM

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4231, 15 January 1940, Page 7

PARLIAMENT'S CRITICISM

WANTED: A DECONTROLLER “At the beginning of the war Parliament passed a number of Bills, almost without discussion, giving the Government exltraordinary powers to control almost every phase of life and business. Few of the members realised what they were doing. I remarked afterwards to one of them: ‘You have abolished (everything except Parliament. Even the petition of -Right has gone by the board.’ “Almost instantaneously the whole

face of the country was blacked out and covered with controllers and deputy-controllers. It had all been pre-arranged land planned; but it was soon fjound that preparedness had been overdone, that immense sums were? being fasted, that the home trade was, being stifled, that -exports were being strangled, and that the suppression of markets, like Billingsgate, was an unendurable calamity.

“Then the value of Parliament was manifested. The fish control has been abolished, and the growing* volume of complaints against coalrestrictions, timber-restrictions, woolrestrictions,. etc., is compelling Ministers to attend to the grievances for which their undertings and z decrees are responsible.

“But the remedy is not mending, but ending; not tightening, but relaxing; not; extending l , but suspending. We want a decontroller.

“Lord Stamp has a great opportunity. I hope he will use it. As supreme Economlic Adviser to the Government he should be able to deal drastically with the delays and futile restrictions that hamper our experts and curtail the, legitimate! business on which the productive incomes of our citizens, and ultimately the revenues of the State, depend.”—Mr Francis Hirst, the economist, in the “Yorkshire Post.”