NO PREFERENTIAL VOTING

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 286, 30 August 1935, Page 6

NO PREFERENTIAL VOTING

“We are a sporting people in New Zealand,” and rather than run a nebulous risk of losing that immaterial distinction, we are going to the General Election as pigs go to the trough—one slithering rush, and the first there gets right in. So the Prime Minister (albeit in more statesmanlike phrasing)* excuses the Government s decision to have nothing to do with preferential voting. If the new Parliament wishes to make a change, he says, that will be its affair; but we do not propose to alter the rules of the game at the last moment. Put that way, the Government’s defence sounds well; but putting it that way hardly represents the true position. The conditions, of the game have been so drastically altered at “the last moment mat, unless the rules also are altered, the result is liable to be farcical. Although the election is still three months off. triangular or multiangular contests are assured already in twenty-six constituencies, and threatened in as many more. When the Prime Minister played halfback for Canterbury the rules were designed to provide for a game contested by thirty players. If sixty or seventy had suddenly descended upon the field, even he might have been agreeable to changing the rules to meet the altered conditions. But not now. Let them all come! The more there are, the greater our repute as a sporting people. > That we should endeavour to give political effect to the wishes of a majority of the electorate does not seem to have occurred to Cabinet. i