Australian State Poll Indecisive: Premier's Budget Triumph: sidney Prepares for 1938 Anniversary From Orr Own Melbourne, Oct. 5.
Experience has shown that Austra-lion electorates will rarely countenance constitutional reform until eve possible alternative has been exhausted. Last March. the Federal referendum to confer greater power to control marketing and aviation on the Commonwealth Parliament failed, and the efforts of the Victorian Government to reform the Legislative Council have not been advanced by the State election this week.
The Victorian Upper House is probably the most conservative legislative body in Australia. For nearly a generation it has been dominated by the conservative element, formerly the Nationalist, and now the United Australia Party. This is not remarkable in a House of Review, but the Council now votes so often on strictly party lines that there is some justification for the Government's charge that it has become an obstructive rather than a deliberative reversal of the "cheap n money" policy of the last four years.
There is also a growing feeling the country that compulsory military training may soon have to be reintroduced. As neither conscription nor a sharp rise in interest rates would be popular, the Government might deem it good politics to transfer the responsibility of dealing with these issues to the Labour Party There have also been signs of per sonal rivalries in the Ministry becoming acute, and some of the United Australia Party Ministers appear to find collaboration with their Country Party colleagues irksome. Open disagreements in Cabinet have been avoided, or at least kept from the public, but those in the best position to know express the view that retirement from office would now be in the best interests of party solidarity and the future collaboration of the two parties that support the present Government, body.
Hence the demands of the Country Party for reform, and of the Labour Party for abolition, of the Upper House. The indecision of the electorate revealed at the poll this week seems attributable to the fear that abolition would prove the ultimate consequence of reform
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.