The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The evening news, Morning news and The Echo. TUESDAY. JULY 30. 1912. THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIII, Issue 181, 30 July 1912, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The evening news, Morning news and The Echo.

TUESDAY. JULY 30. 1912. THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE.

For the cause tlmi lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that ice can, do.

Wo have received a communication from the secretary of the British Proportional Representation Society drawing attention onto more to the spread of the movement for electoral reform at. Home and the necessity- for urging il in our own country. As a matter of fact, we have reason to believe that the movement is making rapid headway in Now Zealand. The recent formation of a society at Wellington to secure this particular reform is _ hopeful omen, and the tone adopted by nearly all the leading newspaper- in the Dominion on this subject certainly encourages the belief that public opinion here ha« already been aroused to a sense of the absurdities and incongruities that disfigure our existing system of electoral representation. The case acrainsl the present method of election has been put with a good deal of forceful brevity by the "Now Zealand Times" in the following sentences:—"At last election 4__.sf>B electors voted. The number of votes recorded for members now sitting in the House was 2.">7,34°. Thus the House of Representatives was elected by little more than half the electors, and 205,210 electors who voted have no representation at ail." It is to remedy this paradoxical condition of things that Proportional Representation is now being advocated, and it seems to us that every intelligent elector in the country should wish the movement, success. As our readers are aware. Now Zealand ha.-" already experimented with a special method of election, devised to remedy some of the inconsistencies which ordinary majority voting usually involves. Like several other progressive countries, we have tried the Second Ballot, and found it wanting. For there can be no doubt that our experience of- the Second Ballot in New ZeaLand coincides precisely with -that of France and Germany in this, that the inevitable combination of various, parties to secure the rejection of special candidates at the second poll has the effect of neutralising tlie benefits that the system might otherwise secure for the people. It is easy to show that in the last German elections tho comparative failure of the Social Democrat* at tho Second Ballobs — they won only 40 out of the !_n constituencies in which they were engaged—was due to the combination of the opposing forces, which thus defeated the very principle the Second Ballot was devised to maintain- And the lesson taught at the German elections has been repeated at every electoral contest in every country where the Second Ballot has been tried. Wo are. therefore, entirely in favour of the proposal put forward by the Mackenzie Government for a radical modification and readjustment of our electoral system on the lines of Proportional "Representation. It is, penhaps, easier to draw illustrations of the evils of tho existing; system from tho experience of Great Britain than from this country, where the numbers of electors and members are loss impressive- But when we realise, for example, that at tho general election of 1000 217,4.2 Welsh voters secured 30 seats for the Ministerialists, while 100,547 electors who voted for the Unionists actively failed to elect a single member, wo begin to understand the enormities of which Iho majority method of election is capable. The defects of the present system —the disproportion between tho. strength of parties in Parliament and tho voting power behind them in the country, the disfranchisement of large minorities in every constituency, the excessive value now attached to a small turnover of voles, the facility with which party managers can exclude candidates to whom Ihoy object by running a third candidate in opposition —all these and many other faults and failings arc now generally recognised and deplored. And as soon as ever the people of Now Zealand realise thai in Proportional Representation there is a simple and practicable remedy for ail those evils, we maylook forward confidently to a revolution in the conditions of our political life, through which the country will secure for the first time the full benefits of the democratic system of .government an.l legislation which we have now adopted irrevocably as our own. X «