CORPORATIVE STATE

Taranaki Daily News, 17 September 1934, Page 8

CORPORATIVE STATE

CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM. ITS OPERATION IN EUROPE. The meaning of the coi-porative State was examined by Mr. L. K. Munro, lecturer in law at Auckland University College, in an address given to the Auckland branch of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand. He illustrated the significance of this type of national organisation by reference to its operation in various forms in several different European countries at present. Mr. Munro quoted the definition of the State as a nation organised for action under legal rules. The corporative State, he said, was a new type of constitutional system in which the employers and the employed, grouped into mixed national corporations, played a predominant part in the government of the country.

In the view of Duguit, the great French jurist, the State was a central agency for the performance of the public services. As these grew in number and complexity, they must fie carried out by decentralisation and federal syndicalism. The question arose whether the Parliamentary system could be replaced by the corporative system without the State ceasing to be democratic. The corporative State implied a new conception of the rights and duties of individuals within the State. The interests of every class in the community had to be borne in mind, and in this it differed from socialist trade unionism and from cartels and trusts. The speaker outlined the organisation of the national council of corporations and its functions, and said that economic planning could be carried out only in a system having discipline and a free expression in economic life. The corporative State gave these two. The corporations in Italy were not independent economic organisations, but were simply State institutions. The members of the corporations were the officials of the Fascist party. The system in Portugal theoi - etically united corporative elements with universal suffrage, and so created a combination of the democratic with the corporative system. But there was dictatorship, and the corporations were simply organs of the State. Mr. Munro also explained the position hi Belgium and in Austria, Among objections to the corporative system Mr. Munro mentioned that all plans were arbitrary whenever they came to the distribution of seats. There was no criterion to determine how many representatives this or that corporation should return. Even in elections, which were purely social in character, political elements played the chief part. The fundamental idea of the representation of interests was false. Representation of interests was inconsistent with the normal functioning of the i-epresentative system. Among the desirable features of the system were the authority it gave and its planned economy. Corporative interests were, however, incompatible with the system of representation by universal suffrage.