The Press TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1933. City Council Committees.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20862, 23 May 1933, Page 8

The Press TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1933. City Council Committees.

I One aspect of the appointment of [ the standing committees of the Christchurch City Council last night will offend a great many citizens. The business was laid before a caucus of Labour members last week and there settled; and it is difficult to imagine a plainer or cruder manifestation of Labour's party consciousness and its determination to fit civic machinery with party cogs. The Labour group, in effect, arrogated to itself a right which belongs to the council as a whole. A question of considerable importance to all councillors was settled by a group of them, acting in no way and by no authority as delegates or a committee of the full body but as a party majority. It is no answer to this statement of the facts to say that the council's right remained intact; that it could have revised the lists; and that it did actually change one of them, by letting Cr. Thacker stand aside from the strenuous activity of the Baths and Entertainments Committee. It is no answer, because the one change that was made is entirely indifferent, and because, as everybody knows, any effort to make a change displeasing to the Labour caucus would have been entirely hopeless. Nor is it any more to the point to say that the Labour caucas has used its power moderately, having appointed two: Citizens' Association members as chairmen of committees and having I distributed membership with a sort of superficial evenness. Two observations are enough to show how little there is in this contention. The first was made by the deputyMayor, Cr. Archer—who may be congratulated on his unanimous reelection—when he said that, after all, it did not matter about Cr. Beanland's being chairman of the Works Committee; for Labour could on questions of principle command a majority on the committee. The second is the obvious fact that the important committees are not the best that could be chosen from around the council table. They are not so constituted as to bring together for the service of the city the most experienced and the best qualified councillors, without respect to party. For party considerations, strong claims have been denied in favour of weaker ones; and this simply means that, for party considerations, the city will be less efficiently served than it might be. It will not indefinitely acquiesce in a system which gives it worse administration than it bargained for through the ballotbox.