LAGGING BEHIND

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 14, 17 January 1930, Page 8

LAGGING BEHIND

(By S. Saunders.)

{POLITICIANS' DISFAVOUR AGAINST ELECTORAL REFORM

Now that the celebrations and festivities of Christmas and New Year have been observed and rationally enjoyed, it may be permissible to turn for a little while to an incident of the Hott by-election which bordered all too closely upon the holidays to be discussed at the time. The Bight Hon. J. G. Coates was addressing a large meeting of electors in the interests of the Keform candidate—whose fine effort in a hopeless contest will long be remembered to his credit—when a raucous voice from some invisible source at the ,'liaclc of tho overflowing hall demanded '"■What about proportional representation?" The Leader of the Opposition taut himself short in a half-uttered sentence, smiled benignly upon a sea of upturned faces, and spoke. "I am not in favour of that," he said emphatically, and then added, almost without the pause of a semicolon: "When tho members of the Labour Party talk about proportional representation they have their tongues in their cheeks." Simply that and nothing more. The audience was silent, and the speaker wae glad. The' incident, however,, was reminiscent of tho fact that just eighteen years before Mr. Coates had drifted into the House of Bepresentativjes by virtue of the second ballot— the> moat unsatisfactory of the several devious paths towards political eminene«s. Mr. Coates, it is scarcely necessary to say, was in no sense responsible for the method of his election. Sir Joi»eph Ward, then Prime Minister in succession to Mr. Seddon, was obsessed by the idea that nothing short of the Secwnd Ballot could save the Liberal Party from ultimate destruction at the relantless hands of its opponents. He obtained his way by the overwhelming majority left him by Mr. Seddon. At the election of 1911 Mr. Coates was the Independent candidate for the Kaipara seat, the seat he now occupies, and Mr. J. Stallworthy, tho father of the present Mimister of Health, was his only foanidable opponent. At the first ballot Mr. Stallworthy polled 2301 votes, Mr. Coates 1843, and Mr. E. T. Field 84S, leaving Mr. Stallworthy in a minority of 300 votes as against the other two candidates. A second ballot therefore was necessary between Mr. Stallworthy and two candidates. A second therefore was Mr. Coates, and the latter having committed himself to supporting Sir Joseph Ward for at least one session of Parliament, was roturned by 2744 votes, a majority of 572 over Mr. Stallworthy's figunes. WHY? Again it is unnecessary to say Mr. Coates was in no way responsible for the re-arrangement of the figures. At this election there were no fewer than thirty second ballots. At the election; of 1908 there had been twenty-three. Had the system survived six years longesr there probably would have been seventy-six, the full numerical strength of thp House of Representatives. At the election of 1911 the results of nine of tha first ballots, as between the-first and second candidates, were reversed. Mr. Ooates, as already stated) displaced Mr. J. Stallworthy in the Kaipara constituency; Mr.. A. Harris, Mr. W. J. Napier, in Waitemata; Mr. J. Payne, the Hon. George Fowlds (now Sir George Fowlds), in Grey Lynnj Mr. G. B. Sylies, Mr. A. W. Hogg, in Masterton; Mr. J. Bobertson, Mr. W. H. Field, in Otaki; Mr. A. H. Hindtnarsh, Mr. K. A. Wright, in Wellington South; Mr. B. M'Cullum, Mr. J. Duncan, in Wairauj the Hon. D. Buddo, Mr. B. Moore, in Kaiapoi;' and Mr. T. H. Davey, Dr. H. T. J. Thacker, in Christchurelj East, fAs things turned out on this occasion, the second ballot did save for the Liberal Party of the day a couple of seats which otherwise would have gone to Beform, and to that extent, Sir Joseph Ward's tactics served their purpose; but the Liberal debacle was next long arrested, an 4 when Mr. Massey came into office, six or seven months later, the Second Ballot was marked down for repeal, and in due course- disappeared from the Statute Book. The now Prime Minister at that tihne was not intimately acquainted wit3i the subtleties of electoral reform, and when he first propounded his scheme for making the Legislative Council an elective body under proportional representation he suggested to a Canterbury audience that its members should be elected by two of the constituencies of the *other branch of the Legislature voting as one, and that the candidate receiving- the largest number of votes should be deemed returned to the Council. That, however, was in. the very beginning of the administrative career of tho broad-mind-ed, deep-chested man who saw the Dominion through the Great War and through the early years of rehabilitation. It is to the- Bight Hon. Sir Francis Ben, Mr. Massey's trusty philosopher and friend, that, the Dominion is indebted for the beginning' of an effort to place its parliamentary representation on a sound basis; but even this service is held! np by the petty differences that separabe the parties. HEW ZEALAND ALONE. For many years New Zealand had as an excuse for its haphazard system of Parliamentary election the flimsy plea that the system of the Mother Country was no better than its own. Now even this lama apology ia slipping from its grasp. Mr. Lloyd George, tho lea.der of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons, has demanded from Mr. Bamsay MaeDonald, the leader of the triumphant Labour Party, that electoral reform shall figure in the Government's policy and that it shall be pushed ahead at the earliest possible moment. Mr. Lloyd George is the man whoen I have quoted before as saying: "We have got an anomalous, unjust, aaid grotesque electoral system which is a fraud and a mockery of democracy." Mr. MaeDonald may not be quite so ardent as Mr. Lloyd George |is in regard to this problem, but he realises where the balance of power 'lies, and be is not likely to go back on his obligations. In any case the need for reform in this respect is just as flagrant here as it is at the heart of the Empire. Mr. Coates claims that he has tbje largest party in the present House of Bepresentatives, twenty-eight, and his political opponents appear content to allow his quaint counting to stand. But a closer examination of the figures reveals the fact that nineteen of his followers are minority representatives —that is r they received fewer than ono-half of the votes polled in their respective constituencies. This means that if the United Party and the Labour Party had co-operated, at the> polls, as they subsequently co-operated iv the House, Beform-would have lost these nineteen seats. Among the sufferers would havo been such prominent figures ass Mr. W. Downie Stewart, in a minority of 1203 votes; Mr. J. A. i'oung in a. minority of 1050; Mr. D. Tones in a minority of 1144; Mr. A. Harris in a minority of 2180, and Mr. R. A. Wright in a minority of 1275. Of course, the results were balanced among tho parties, the United Party having twielve minority members and the Labour Party seven, but the fact remains thajt thirty-eight members of the present House—one-half of the

whole number —hold their seats against the will of a majority of their constituents. This demonstrates beyond all question that the present system of election falls far short of the results it originally was intended to achieve. HAPHAZARD RESULTS. Since the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 there havo been rive General Elections in tho Dominion. The first of these was hold in. December of that eventful year and resulted in the Beform Party retaining office by the narrow majority of two. At that time thero was no Labour Party in tho House, those eager souls who were dreaming dreams and seeing visions j being content meanwhile to leave thoir destiny in tho hands of the Liberals. This fact makes it all the easier to show that it is not the multiplication of parties that confus.es the outcome of an election under the existing haphazard system; but tho presence of a clumsy, illogical method of voting. Iv the four North Auckland constituencies in 1914 15,850 votes were cast for Eeform candidates and 11,095 for Liberal candidates, but all four seats under tho single electorate system went to Eeform. In the six Auckland City j seats 20,836 votes were cast for Lib-1 eral candidates and 20,530 for Eeform i candidates with the obviously unequitable result that four seats went to the Liberal Party and only two to the Eeform Party. In the four constituencies of the East Coast of the North Island 17,667 votes were cast for Liberal candidates and 13,198 for Eeform candidates, but never a seat was secured for Eeform. With 15,798 votes in the five Taranaki constituencies the Reform Party picked up four seats, while the Liberal Party with 12,556 votes secured only one. In the South Island the confusion was even worse confounded. In Christchurch, for Instance, the Liberals with 21,818 votes captured the whole of the five city seats, while the Reformers with 14,714 votes obtained no representation at all within this wide area. Then there was the election of 1919, after the "Long Parliament" of the war period, when the Labour Party definitely entered tho political arena as an independent entity. Of the 542,667 votes polled at. this election, the Eeform Party with 206,461 votes secured fortyrfour seats, while the Liberal Party with 196,337 votes secured only twenty-two seats and the Labour Party with 127,042 votes only eight seats, the remaining two seats going to Independent candidates with 12,345 votes. This surely was a travesty of democratic justice that should have awakened the whole community to the need for protest and reform. And yet Mr. Coates, probably with the approbation of seventy-five per cent, of the members of the present Parliament, is not in favour of proportional representation.. ■ • . '