The Evening Star THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 1923. MUNICIPAL MEETINGS.

Evening Star, Issue 18254, 19 April 1923, Page 6

The Evening Star THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 1923. MUNICIPAL MEETINGS.

It is no secret that mayoral and municipal candidates are disappointed -with their Dunedin audiences. There has been much correspondence in the Press on municipal matters, little of it of a laudatory nature, and the number of nominations for the council can be construed as a symptom of dissatisfaction and a desire for change. Yet very few of the public leave their firesides or forfeit other evening attractions either to encourage or to heckle candidates when they take to the platform. 'When a pair of councillors take a hall and invite people to come and hear them, and the respond is an audience of a score, more or less, the temptation is to declare that the cry of dissatisfaction with the past administration is a “ vamp,” and that disturbance of public apathy in municipal government has not , 'penetrated more than a fraction of ,an J inch below, the surface.

In our opinion there are faults on botli sides to account for sparse attendances. Public apathy may not have been stirred to the depths, but it has been stirred more deeply than usual. Evidently it has not yet been stirred deeply enough to dnduco substitution of personal attendance at meetings for the easier method of reading nil about them next day in the Press. Possibly the captions section of the public has no higher an estimate of councillors as talkers than it has of them as doers. And, to tell the truth, many of tho councillors who have so far spoken in public have done little to correct or remove that impression. Their speeches have been colorless. They have failed to appreciate the real position or have ingeniously evaded it. Prospective voters are not to be stampeded into spending an evening hearing a councillor toll them how “ tho host interests of the citizens are going to bo conserved in the future as in the past,” nor in absorbing details of an elaborate progressive programme of municipal improvements which they know very well 's very far up in the air and likely to stay there indefinitely. As a correspondent pointed out last night, councillors are too prone to speak of tho success of various trading departments as though tho credit was all theirs—even for their inaugura-tion—-whereas those concerns are tho Inheritance of pioneering councils, which laid the foundations well and truly long ago. "What many citizens want to know is why there has been so little addition to the superstructure in recent years, for the foundations were designed to carry something, not merely to be kept in a fair state of preservation—sometimes, as in parts of the water supply system, not even that. Self-congratulation about profits derived from long and well-established trading concerns, all of them practically municipal monopolies, is not very impressive. At all events, it has not proved itself a big popular draw. This week, however, tho public is promised better campaign rations. Cr Shaddock is to give an illustrated lecture on the Waipori system. This is one of tho corporation departments which mint be specially and emphatically exempted trein any charge of nou-progres-siveness. One reason is that, once started, it satisfied so well that .customers have besieged its doors in ever increasing numbers. Furthermore, in his long chairmanship of the E.P. arid Id. Committee, Cr Shaddock has been a “live wire. From the beginning ho has had faith in the venture, and he has been an advocate of its steadv extension to the limit. Just because of that wo decline to attach to him responsibility for avoidable delay in bringing in Hue additional current for which so many are now wailing. Cr Scott, chairman of tho Tramways Committee, hs also devoting an evening this week exclusively to the subject of tho Eoslyn tram. lie is to be commended for Ms courage and his sense of responsibility in thus tackling this vexed question, and lie deserves, and will possibly obtain, a full house.