COUNTRY QUOTA

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 96, 24 April 1945, Page 9

COUNTRY QUOTA

SHOULD BE LARGER

MR. AL6IE ON ELECf ORATES P.A. CHRISTCHURCH, April 23. A suggestion that the country quota, instead of being abolished, should be increased to give primary producers more nearly equal representation with the town people, was made by Mr. R. M. Algie,-, M.P. for Remuera, in a speech at Lincoln this evening. He said that even with the country quota the city members dominated any Government. When the 1941 census was postponed the Minister of Finance (Mr. Nash) had said there were two good reasons. The first was that the census would cost about £30,000, the biggest item being paper, which was dear and hard to get. The second was that the staffs of the Statistics Department and Post and Telegraph Department, which would have to do most of the work, had been depleted by the war. Those explanations, said Mr. Algie, were given in July, 1940, when the people had only just stopped talking about the "phoney war." Would paper be cheaper or easier to get now? Was the statistics staff full, and were all the post and telegraph men back from the war? Why were these reasons no longer so good? The answer was that there was going to be an alteration in the boundaries of the electorates. The country quota was to go, if they could believe the Labour member for Grey Lynn (Mr. Hackett). Mr. Algie said that the country quota was adopted in the first place because some of the country electorates would have been impossibly large They might have had all North Auckland, from North Cape to Waitemata, in one electorate, or one electorate for the West Coast stretching from Farewell Spit to Milford Sound. The country quota had been an advantage to the country people, but had they abused it? Had they used it ungenerously? They had not. They had never had a chance to get any of the political pie. "Which group has had the best of it," asked Mr. Algie, "the city or the country? We city people have had it. We have always had the majority in any Government. Instead of the country quota being reduced I think it might be increased. A lot of the people of my electorate have said the same when it has been put to them." "One man, one vote," was not the last word, Mr. Algie said. The last one word had always to be heard. It was "justice." If the country people were the basic producers and the backbone of the nation they should have at least equal representation in Parliament, and the country quota did not give them that.