The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. MONDAY, MAY 27, 1935. SELF-GOVERNING TANGLES.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20624, 27 May 1935, Page 6

The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. MONDAY, MAY 27, 1935. SELF-GOVERNING TANGLES.

' | a HE GROUNDS on which the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee has disallowed Western Australia’s right to petition the British Parliament only make confusion worse confounded, for a constitutional impasse is quickly reached by the impossibility of reconciling the Statute of Westminster with the claim of the Select Committee that the Parliament of the United Kingdom could dissolve the Federal Union in Australia, even against the wisli and without the consent of the Commonwealth. There is one passage in the report which reads very strangely:— The legal competence of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to legislate for th® internal affairs of any Dominion or self-governing State or colony can only be reconciled with the fundamental conception of them as autonomous communities, and it would be easv to state the practical difficulties which would follow from any departure from this principle. If in this cablegram the words " can only be reconciled ” were not meant to read “ can not be reconciled,” the report amounts to a ruling that Canada, Australia and New Zealand are not autonomous or selfgoverning communities, whereas the Statute of Westminster clearly states that they are, and the question arises as to what legal links, written or unwritten, were swept away by that Statute. The layman may be pardoned for thinking that the constitutional procedure in this case is for Western Australia to petition the King, who, in the absence of an Imperial Parliament, might set up an inter-imperial commission on the subject, unless the aid of the League of Nations is to be invoked. If none of these things can be done, the only effective thing that Western Australia can resort to now is either passive or active resistance to the dictates of the Commonwealth, and this would amount to civil war. The ca§e clearly sets out the inadequacy of the constitution “ as things stand,” to use a phrase of the committee.