Labour selects ‘well-balanced’ team for voters

Press, 21 April 1986, Page 5

Labour selects ‘well-balanced’ team for voters

The Labour Party’s Canterbury Regional Council has decided on most of the party’s candidates for the October local body elections. Labour candidates had been named early last month for the North, South, and Pegasus wards of Christchurch City. Selection meetings on Saturday decided the line-up for the East and West wards, and for all but one of the regional ad hoc bodies. The leader of the Labour team, a City councillor and its mayoral candidate, Cr Alex Clark, said last evening that it was “the most experienced and well-balanced team ever presented to the voting public.”

Of the 18 persons selected to contest City Council seats, eight were women. Cr Clark said he expected “at least seven” to be successful, since they would be standing in safe Labour wards. Three of the candidates were Maori, and 11 were “well qualified and experienced people” standing for local government for the first time, said Cr Clark.

In the West ward, the candidates are Mrs Hinemoa Connor, a young Maori mother and law student; Mr Bruce Dyer, a florist and company director; and Mr Trevor Warr, a psychiatric and general nurse and a senior member of the Public Service Association. Cr Clark said that Labour had taken special care with the selection of its West ward candidates because of the likelihood that a third party (the Christchurch Ratepayers’ Protection Committee) would put up candidates. “For the first time, Labour candidates have a real chance in the West ward,” he said. East ward candidates are a sitting councillor, Mrs Mollie Clark; a former City councillor, Mr Charles Manning; and two newcomers to local government, Messrs Dennis O’Rourke and Brian Johnson.

Mr Manning is a senior lecturer in the classics department of the University of Canterbury and was chairman of the health committee on the last Labour City Council. Messrs O’Rourke and

Johnson have been active in the Labour Party for several years. A replacement for Cr Rex Lester, who died recently of injuries suffered in a motor accident, will be decided on May 6 for the South ward. Cr Clark said that the candidates, along with those already named, showed “an extraordinarily wide range of interests and abilities.”

“This year’s campaign will be strikingly different from previous years. We will be fighting on peoplerelated issues and the financial mismanagement of the Citizens’ administration. We intend taking the campaign to the people wherever we can get Labour’s voice heard,” he said.

Cr Clark identified local government reform as an important issue. “We expect a lively debate as the people of the city begin to understand the challenges and consequences of the major changes proposed,” he said.

The community could look forward to many “novel inventions” in the Labour campaign, he said.