Page 6 Advertisements Column 1

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2687, 17 December 1909, Page 6

WHAT ARE YOU PAID FOR?

A PERTINENT QUERY

(From the Dominion)

“What are you paid for?” was a question asked by Mr. Fisher in the House in the course of a protest against the Government’s anxiety to adqpt a policy of “legislation by exhaustion” instead of the policy of asking members to stay and do their work properly. It is a question .that many people must have asked themselves every session for years past. Yet Mr. Fisher’s pertinent inquiry aroused all the spirits of wrath and protest in the bosoms of many members. Some of them became vocal in their indignation. Mr. Hogan, for example, whom we should say was not any worse off in his capacity as M.P. than! he was previously, was quite fierce in his resentment of the idea that anyone should inquire into the relation between the work and the pay of a member of the House. “Withered,” so in effect he said, “withered be the nose that pokes 1 into the members’ doings.” Yet, as it is the public that pays the M.P., the public has some 'trifling interest in. seeing; that it gets ‘its mbney’s worth. Mr. Hogan asks us to ipiagine the M.P. as a person who is tottering' under his weight of toil — legislating hard between -2.30 p.ni. and '2.30 a.m., working in committees from '9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and writing hundreds of letters' every day, and doing this for quite four months in the .year. The .public does not crowd into the gallenes, but it reads all the papers, and it knows that these toil-worn heroes are often asleep, or reading, or chattering for the greater-part of the time—or absent from the Chamber, to which they return at such times as the. division bell rings. Curiously enough, /the men who attend most closely to business are the men who. do not feel affronted when somebody asks them to render an account of their services. Mr. Hogan apparently thinks members should receive £SOO a year. It would not be wise for the member for Wanganui to bring down a motion to that effect. '

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