Polling Peculiarities.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18550, 27 November 1925, Page 8

Polling Peculiarities.

Not the least interesting feature of the Australian election-period .newspapers is the evidence they afford of the difference between Australian and New Zealand laws —a difference of which New Zealand cannot always be proud. There is the fact, to begin with, that voting, and not merely enrolling, is compulsory in the Commonwealth. No warning appeared so frequently in the newspapers to the very last day, and even on Polling Day, as that against neglecting to vote, the penalty being mentioned in every case. Strangers to democracy would easily conclude after perusing the Melbourne and Sydney dailies for the first fortnight in November that the Australian public are tho most thoughtful, the most watchful, the most kind-hearted people in the whole world; that their newspapers exist to keep people out of the hands of the police; that nothing is too much trouble for anybody if the object is to keep the careless from straying. The explanation is, of course, that each side was afraid that the other side might have the most lawabiding citizens. After the poll each side said that compulsion had nothing to do with the enormous vote, that its followers poured into the booths merely because they were good Australians and were aware that liberty was endangerqd. But the fact clearly is that both sides did their utmost to exploit a thoroughly bad law, and are trying now to look virtuous. In this case we have no particular reason to envy Australians, unless for their more logical wickedness; though it is difficult to say which is the more absurd —to punish an elector for not getting ready to vote, while leaving him free to turn his back on the ballotbox, or to punish him for not voting, while leaving him free to vote informally. But another difference that would strike some New Zealanders even more forcibly than the compulsory voting is the liberty the law allows the newspapers on Polling Day itself. Here no newspaper may be quite frank and sensible on Polling Day, or for three days before. In Australia Polling Day is like any other:

the newspapers say- what they like and display what they lite; tell the people how to vote and show them how to vote; in brief, assume that they are precisely the same people an hour before they vote as a week before, and that a person old enough to be entrusted with a voting-paper itself is or ought to be old enough to be entrusted with any number of imitations. There is no reason why newspapers should not have the amc liberty in the Dominion as they have in the Commonwealth, and the fact that they do not is not creditable to our political intelligence.' It is indeed not creditable to us in deeper ways than those of the intellect, since it means that we prefer the sham to the real, and in this matter, as in, say, the publication of totalisator dividends, affect an austerity that everybody knows to lie false. Hut we are certainly wiser than the Australians in the third respect in which our law differs from theirs. Our law dors not, as theirs does, suppose, or pretend to suppose, or declare from malice prepense, jhat anonymous journalism is a cloak for political- corruption. Our laws against libel are very severe indeed, as every country's laws ought to be, and in every ease in which ;i newspaper takes liberties with a politician's name or reputation he has an immediate, certain, and very effective remedy. In Australia he had, and has, the same remedy. But the Australian law attempts also what only South Africa in addition has ever thought of doing —it seeks to victimise or intimidate the agent of the newspaper as well as to secure redress from the newspaper itself. It is only when an election campaign is actually in progress, and the newspapers appear with every political article of every kind signed, that we remember this evil, and realise what its purpose is. But perhaps Mr Bruce will now sweep it away as a thing wicked in itself, and reminiscent of other kinds of wickedness.