All Labour M.P.s to visit electorate

Press, 14 May 1985, Page 2

All Labour M.P.s to visit electorate

By

MICHAEL HANNAH

in Wellington

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Timaru voters will see all Labour Party members of Parliament during the byelection campaign through a series of house calls aimed at answering voters’ questions.

According to the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, the technique is not novel. Labour used it in the byelection which returned him to the Mangere seat, and in the Christchurch Central byelection, which launched the now deputy party leader, Mr Palmer, into Parliament.

The technique includes a canvass of the electorate, to gauge voters’ concerns. Specific questions are then handled by Cabinet Ministers or members of Parliament, who will pay a visit of two to three days on average to call on voters at home to answer their questions.

Mr Lange said yesterday that the party had had more than 100 people canvassing Timaru last week, while other parties were occupied selecting their candidates, “pontificating from Wellington,” or “fighting among themselves.” The canvassers also tried

to ensure that voters were on the electoral roll.

Mr Lange decried the use of hall meetings to judge a party’s by-election campaign.

“A campaign is not simply a set piece of hall meetings. Those are of no great impact at all,” he said at a press conference yesterday after the Cabinet had discussed by-election tactics.

“Who comes to them? The curious, the committed, the should-be-committed.

“The people who are going to win that Timaru by-election are the people who are thinking seriously about Timaru.” He said that all members of the Labour caucus would visit Timaru at some stage through the election campaign. Travel expenses for members of Parliament would be met by the taxpayer, as would those of the National Party, which Mr Lange thought would also send its whole caucus to the electorate.

The party canvassers had found that Timaru voters were concerned about leadership in the National Party, Mr Lange said. Some were also concerned about being hurt by economic changes, but Mr Lange maintained that Timaru voters did not “believe in Father Christmas” and were “in for the long haul” to economic recovery. “People are actually prepared to see that you can’t have a party every night of the week, that you have to consolidate, and have an economic change,” Mr Lange said. “They don’t believe in Father Christmas, they don’t think that politicians can deliver money to them all the time. They know a basket-case of an economy when they see one. They saw they had one in July last year, and they know it can’t be rectified overnight.

“They are a provincial city that isn’t going to be wooed by some sort of magician from the North Shore of Auckland.”

Although Mr Lange is not booked to speak at a hall meeting until later this month, he said yesterday that it was obvious Labour’s campaign had started a week ago. It also appears that Labour will rely on the impact of hall meetings later in the campaign, after many of its members of Parliament have visited voters at home.

Mr Lange maintained that Timaru would send a message back to the National Party to get its act together, work out who its leader is, and who its president is, because until it did, the party was not worth voting for.

Canvassers had found very low interest in third parties, and he still rated Labour’s chance of holding the seat as “much better than 50:50.”

Mr Lange said New Zealand Party votes from last July would go either to Labour “with the endorsement of its leader” (Mr Bob Jones), or would be held by the New Zealand Party “with the encouragement of the candidate.” He could see no incentive for New Zealand Party votes to go to National.