Mr. Seddon was asked by Mr. Ballance to take part in the debate on the Address-in-reply, and followed Mr. T. Fergus, Minister for Public Works and Mines. Mr. Seddon, of course, was better qualified than any other member to criticise the Department of Works and Mines, and he did so on this occasion with all his vigour. The Opposition had been asked by the Government to wait until the Financial Statement came down before it made its attack.
“Wait till the Financial Statement is ready?” Mr. Seddon said derisively. “When we have the Financial Statement, we shall be told to wait for the Public Works Statement, so we will go drivelling on until two or three weeks have passed, and then the cry will be: ‘You have been in Wellington nearly a month now; here is some work for you to do.’ It is by such tactics as these that the Ministers have managed time after time and Parliament after Parliament, even when they were in a minority, to keep their seats there, like barnacles on a ship’s bottom.”
A large portion of his attack dealt with personal charges against Ministers, and he demanded explanations about one thing and another from nearly every member of the Government. The Governor’s Speech seemed to him to be nothing more than a bald statement. He, like Mr. Ballance, wanted to know what would be done for the men and women who had been hoping against hope for the colony’s condition to improve, and whose eyes had been turned to New South Wales and Victoria. That bald statement, in the face of the deplorable condition of the colony, was, to his mind, the last straw.
The Government had stated that “the position of the colonists, as far as their private indebtedness is concerned, has greatly improved,” and that an additional area of land had been settled. He suggested that the paragraph ought to have read: “That those who hold the estate, the patrimony, of the people in large areas have, through the present administration and the land laws, been able to increase those areas.” He asked for information about the 20,000 persons who had left New Zealand. He valued them at £150 a head, and found that, in plain round figures, on a strictly commercial basis, they were worth £3,000,000 to New Zealand.
