Where is its Policy To-Day?

The Royal Commission, on that greatest of economic questions, the land question has been seeking to find a policy for this Ministry, the lineal descendants of the Liberal party of 1890, whose high purposes and aims on this very land question stirred the pulses of every man who hoped for reform and loved his country in 1890. A subterfuge, like nearly all subterfuges, the Land Commission failed in its purpose, and the only tangible result of this act of cowardice on the part of the Seddon Ministry is that the taxpayers have page 29 to pay the cost of the Commission—a cool twenty thousand pounds in hard cash—because the Premier has no conviction to guide him or has found his own preservation of greater importance than the declaration of a definite land policy.

To-day. August 23th, weeks after the report of the Commission is placed in members' hands, the Premier tables a series of vague "fishing" re-solutions, and by means of the discussion upon these inanities he hopes to manufacture sufficient patches to make up a new Land Bill.

Surely this Ministry has been in commission so long that it requires to be docked for a complete overhaul. The barnacles which have accumulated during its long voyage retard its progress, and it has degenerated from the clipper of 1891 into the clumsy barge of 1905.