NEW ZEALAND

GOVERNMENT GAZETTE.

(PROVINCE OF WELLINGTON.)

Published by Authority.

All Public Notifications which appear in this Gazette, with any Official Signature thereto annexed, are to be considered as Official communications made to those Persons to whom they may relate, and are to be obeyed accordingly.

By His Honor’s command,
WILLIAM FITZHERBERT, Provincial Secretary.

VOL. L. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1854. [No. 23.]

SPEECH

OF HIS

HONOR THE SUPERINTENDENT

DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE SECOND SESSION

OF THE PROVINCIAL COUNCIL, DECEMBER 21, 1854.

Mr. Speaker and Gentlemen of the Provincial Council,—

However difficult and peculiar the circumstances under which we first met, those under which we are now assembled are, to my mind, of far deeper interest—far graver import; for while we met then to set in motion a part of the Constitution, we meet now to examine the working of the whole machine.

You will remember that forced as the Provincial Councils were into existence before the Assembly was even convened, I did not hesitate to avow that one of my chief aims would be to render the Provincial in all provincial matters entirely independent of the General Government; and that you in an address to her Majesty, expressive of your regret at the delay in calling the General Assembly together, declared, that while you attached the highest value, as an indispensable means of good government in this country of distinct and isolated settlements, to the local legislatures which the new Constitution had conferred upon each Province, and which were then most beneficially in actual operation throughout the colony; yet at the same time you were intimately persuaded, that the action of a General Legislature was indispensably required, both as the only means whereby the Provinces could obtain an extension of their authority to matters of the utmost local importance, which were excluded from their jurisdiction, and also as a means of uniform law and administration with regard to subjects properly belonging to general government.

Two sessions of the Assembly having been held, the question naturally suggests itself how far these views have been carried out—how far your expectations realised.

Into the history of the General Assembly I pretend not to enter. Its convention by a temporary administrator of the Government, who held at the same time the office of Superintendent of a province, an office which her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies has declared it was his Excellency’s duty to have resigned, when he assumed the ad-interim administration of the government of the colony; the inaugural address, in which his Excellency declared, “that the legislative authority of the Provinces would need to be rather narrowed in its range,” and impressed upon the Assembly the necessity of exercising a vigilant supervision over “the legislative proceedings of the Provincial Councils;” the adoption of that centralising policy by the first New Zealand ministry; the false position in which the majority of the representatives were placed, of either supporting a ministry of whose policy few approved, or of risking the establishment of ministerial responsibility; the curious episode (when the ministry fell) of an honorable member boasting that he had been constituted his Excellency’s sole adviser; the indignant remonstrance of the house which compelled his retirement from his Excellency’s councils; the unexpected and informal, if not illegal prorogation—attempted nevertheless with the beneficial result of sweeping away all the bills then before the Assembly; the formation of another ministry—taken from a small minority; his Excellency’s address on opening the second Session, in which, denouncing the previous policy, he advocated the principles of ultra-provincialism, proposed instead of curtailing the powers of the Provincial Governments to hand over to them the powers expressly reserved from them by the Constitution Act in which his Excellency no sooner enunciated great and sound Constitutional doctrines, than... he intimated his intention to violate them... the immediate rejection of the Ministry by a vote of “want of confidence;” the hurried passing of a few measures; the scramble for the public monies, and the final prorogation—these and other incidents and matters connected with the two first Sessions of the General Assembly, have been too fully explained to require further notice at my hands on the present occasion. I thus briefly enumerate them, partly for the purpose of reminding you to what accidents—to what reckless guidance—to what rude assaults the Constitution has been exposed, but chiefly in the hope that you will not shrink from expressing your opinion upon those questions which the General Assembly...