REFLECTORS OF LABOUR!

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 138, 8 December 1937, Page 12

REFLECTORS OF LABOUR!

. The "as-you-werc" result of the municipal elections in llie city of Sydney, held on Monday, is of special interest because in the city of Sydney —if not in other municipalities and shires—the whole political Labour Party fights to secure the municipal representation. The Labour campaign for llie Sydney City Council has ceased to be merely a Sydney affair; it has even ceased to be merely a New South "Wales, affair, because the Federal Labour Leader, Mr. Curtin, made a special appeal to Sydney electors to support Labour candidates. Those electors who still have a Sydney viewpoint in their local autonomy are perturbed at the idea that the municipal fates of one of the world's greatest cities should be dictated by Mr. Curtin, a citizen of Fremantle, which is on the western limit of the continent and about as far-away from Sydney as any Australian township can be. They are also perturbed because Mr. Curlin appeals to the Sydney electors to vole Labour, "so that llie municipal administration in New South Wales will reflect the purposes and ideals of Labour." Do the electors of Sydney desire to reflect political Labour? Do the electors of Wellington, and other New Zealand municipal centres, desire to reflect Labour? If they do not desire to be mere reflectors, a little mental reflection will convince them that only vigorous counter-campaigning will repel Labour's political attack on cities.

In the past, the political parlyism of Australian Labour in city elections has won a sufficient degree of success to compel the opposing political partyism to organise more or less on party lines. The "Sydney Morning Herald" thus sums up the party war which has thus developed:

In the city wards- party claims are asserted above everything else. This arises from the insistence of the political Labour Party in making it so, and in reply the Citizens' Reform Association is bound to devise its own organisation to co\mter the abuse in this fashion of the city's local government. It hardly needs repeating that party government, necessary in Parliament, has properly nothing whatever to do with the business regulation of the city's affairs.

The position of a local organisation like the Sydney Citizens' Reform Association, in being compelled to counter-campaign to a certain extent on party lines, while protesting against the politicalisation of municipal affairs, may be compared with that of the British Government, which stands for peace and disarmament but which yet is compelled to re-arm on an enormous scale in order to check the use of force. Peace and disarmament remain the principle of the re-arming Government,"and the freeing of municipal administration from political influence remains the purpose of a citizens' reform body, whatever weapons it may have to use to repel an avowed party-political campaign. Such a Labour attack is not to be met by a string of independent individual candidates. Ndn-Labour needs in its cities an organisation not less efficient than that of its opponents

As a result of the party-political election in the city of Sydney on Monday, the parlies on the Sydney City Council (it is cabled) remain the same—Citizens Reform 12, Labour 8. The volume of the polling is not mentioned in the cablegram, but it should have been heavy, if it was at all in line with the intensity of the campaigning. Complaint was made in the New South Wales Parliament on December 2 that campaign canvassers were approaching Maltese who are unable to read or write, and were securing for them postal votes to avoid their meeting the returning officer. Even at that date the number of postal voting forms issued was three limes the number issued at the last election. All this manoeuvring indicates a very keen fight, which would have attracted still wider notice Had it boon held in advance of, instead of after, the Federal General Election.