LATE PARLIAMENTARY.

Observer, Volume 2, Issue 41, 25 June 1881, Page 454

LATE PARLIAMENTARY.

(BY SPECIAL WIRE.) Wellington, Thursday Afternoon. OVER THE SPEAKER'S CHAIR. Local Government — Men think and speak of nothing else. The Government organs write about it day by day. It is tho lever by which Ormond wants to get into office, the cry Grey will carry to the husting, the one thing the Bank of New Zealand will steadily resist. If the provinces were abolished, then the banking -business of the Colony could be consolidated, and now it is proposed to undo, or to have undone, all that Tom Russell achieved witli so much, zeal, pressure, and patience. The great objection to local government is that they can bank with any Corporation they plense. Under the present system the one bank keeps all the Government money. Let me give an illustration of how central government reacts on central banking. Last week the member for Waipa moved for a return of all school reserves which had been mortgaged or sold since the passing of the High School Reserves Act, 1880. On Tuesday the return was made, and areserve in Southland was allowed to be mortgaged to the extent of £1200 from the Bank of New Zealand ; only, with the remembrance of the story of a ten thousand pound cheque changing hands over this same question of abolition of local government, I watch carefully the bank barometer. When Moss told the House that local government sat at the Ministerial table, like Banquo's ghost, Ministers enquired of each other whether Rolleston or Dick were meant, but they all agreed, after consultation, that Dick was meant, because he was the older man and nearer to the land of Hades, and Hall wanted to know if he wore a beckoning ghost, still stubborn, and whether his provincial hunger would niake him stalk off reluctant from his central habitude, like an ill-used ghost not to return. One of the most important contributions to the forcing of local government on the House, was the unostentatious motion of the member for Port Chalmers that no licensing bill would be satisfactory to the House or to the country, that did not enable licensing districts to provide their own scale of licensing rates and the regulations to be adopted in such districts. Here we see back to the core of the difficulty. He gave the notice of motion as though he were supping kail modestly withOiit even the blinking of an eye or betraying the consciousness that he laid the axe to the root of the tree of Central Government. When the Abolition Bill was passed on the 17th October, 1876, there were thirty -two ayes and six pairs for the Bill, twenty noes and the same number of pairs. Of these thirty-two, nineteen are either dead or no longer members of the House. Of the twenty noes ten have shared the same fate of the six pairs for the measure, only Ballance survives.