The Mayoralty.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17740, 17 April 1923, Page 8

The Mayoralty.

The immediate effect of the labour Party's decision to .run a candidate for the Mayoralty is the public humiliation of the Labour Representation Committee; the ultimate effect—a much more serious' one—is the wasting of a good deal of time and money. To the Labour nominee himself, Mr D. G. Sullivan, M.P., there can be no kind of personal objection. He has capaeity, a good deal of experience, and a perfectly clean public record. But to; suppose that, if he were elected, his actions" would be his own, is like supposing that the ; course run by a cabliorse represents its real taste in landscape. The majority of those chiefly concerned would not like Mr Sullivan's own municipal course even if he could follow it—apart from his fripnda, he has a fondness for misty by-paths that lead nowhere but into trouble; but_ as the agent and servant of the Party he would be quite impossible. Christchurch, which is rated at present to its full legal limit,- cannot afford the further adventures to which a Labour Council would be sure to commit it. It cannot afford to'have a Labour Mayor obstructing the policy of rigid economy which the Citizens' Party is'pledged to carly through. Some Labour members will, and should,'be elected, the need of the community is for fewer of them' at the Council table instead of more, and for a Mayor as far removed from Utopian dreaming as Sullivan is from prudent finance. Nor can there be any doubt at all that it is a disqualification, which we hope electors will regard as absolute, that Mr Sullivan is a Member of Parliament. The present Mayor has so many other disqualifications that he is not a good case to argue from; but even he might have been much more useful to the city had he been here every day. We bolieve, indeed, that, so far as they have, and understand, and mean honestly to stand by, a policy on this question, Labour in on themselves object to the occupation of two important offices by one person. It may bo only vanity, of course, and a desire to enablo two individuals to be happy instead of ono, but whatever Labour's purposo is, it has frequently condemned such a courso as that, it now proposes to follow. The proper exampla in this matter was set recently in Timaru, where a Mayor who could have, had a walk-over return to office, whoso retirement in fact his townsfolk regard as n public calamity, decided that election to Parliament, was a call to him to withdraw from all other public offiees. But then the man who has retired from

the most important public offica ii\

Timaru, and from the most important but one—for he was Chairman also of the Harbour Board —had a theory that it is a much more reprehensible practice to plav fast and iQose with public money than with one's own, and we do not sunpose that the Labour Party of Christchurch would think a person so hopelessly antiquated worth follow iug in any circumstances.