THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1907. AUSTRALIA'S NEW PARLIAMENT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8336, 19 January 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1907. AUSTRALIA'S NEW PARLIAMENT.

The recent election of the third Federal Parliament of the Australian Commonwealth was probably a disappointment to all three parties engaged in the contest. A triangular duel, it need hardly be said, is at all times likely to result in this way; and the circumstances of pur Australian neighbours were such as to make the outlook a more than usually doubtful one. The disappointment which all parties appear to feel, however, is unquestionably, and perhaps, naturally, most keenly felt by Mr Reid and his followers, the advocates of a policy of Anti-Socialism. It is _ true they have come out of the contest with a larger party in the third Parliament than they had in the second and possess more voting power in both Senate and House than either of the other parties, but they, or at any rate their leader, had hoped for and expected much more than this, and they have failed to get it. The campaign undertaken by the leader of the Free Trade Opposition in the late Pai-liament seemed a very promising one, and nothing seems to have been wanting in the energy with which it was carried out. So far as appearances went there was every chance of its success, and every hope that Mr Reid and his friends would find themselves in a majority in both chambers of the new Parlia-

ment. When the party had been started not only with a new name, but on a much wider basis of policy than before, it seemed almost a certainty to them and to many others that a considerable majority of the electors would rally to its standard; that they failed to do so is a matter which even now requires more explanation than has been supplied either by Mr Reid or his opponents. To say that the re suit was due to the fact that the hostility to Mr Reid himself, felt so generally in Victoria, could not be overcome even by so great an issue as that raised between a policy of .Socialism and of Anti-Socialism may be true, but it appears hardly probable if the bearings of the policy involved were at all fully understood. To offer the explanation that the result was brought about by the deliberate refusal of one-half the electors, to exercise their privileges or to do their manifest duty under circumstances that were certainly critical may be the truth, but it fails to explain the reasons. The fact that only in one State, and that the smallest and least populous of , the States of the Commonwealth, did more than half the persons whose names were on the rolls, actually vote at all on an issue so vital as that put before them is not only unprecedented, but under the circumstances exceedingly puzzling. The • immediate result is, nominally at least, to leave parties nearly where they were before the elections, and a great issue, vital to the country's future, unsettled, and, indeed, for all practical purposes, undealt with.