Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, JULY 13, 1920. THE REPRESENTATION QUESTION.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIII, Issue 1863, 13 July 1920, Page 4

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, JULY 13, 1920. THE REPRESENTATION QUESTION.

Trn; Hon. George Fowldsp who is not taken Very seriously bV Aucklanders, to whom he lias thrice appealed unsuccessfully for a renewal of. the confidence bestowed in him' as one of the Parliamentary representatives of the northern city in by-gone'days, is known as a consistent exponent of, Single Tax and Proportional .Representation principles. .Lust week he was-interviewed in Christchurch hy a journal which is always ready to accept as authoritative, statements that are calculated to injure the Government, and some of his remarks have found their way into print in other papers, via the Press Association. Amongst other things, Sir Joseph Ward’s sometime Minister of Defence and Education, naively admitted that the Second Ballot Act, passed by the Government of which he was a member, was bad, and that, knowing it to be such, he tried his best to prevent it becoming law. put the Act itself was passed in 1908, and wo do not remember to have heard, or read, that Mr Fowlds ever raised his voice in opposition to the system which seemed likely tj strengthen and perpetuate, the Wardite regime; and which he now condemns in public, apparently for the first time. The Second Ballot was introduced to ensure what is termed “majority rule.” ( Actually, in its working, it gave facilities to the minority to exorcise its casting vote in favour of one or other of the political parties dominating the politics of the country. It opened the way, moreover, to the formation of demoralising alliances, in which the minority party was placed in a. position to exact, as the price of its support, far more than it was entitled to. Mr Fowlds is now enamoured, and has been, since his exclusion from Parliament, of the Proportional Voting system, for which it is claimed that it gives to every Party that representation to which its,’numbers entitle it. Theoretically, the. system appears do all that is claimed for it. Practically it does the opposite. Mr Fowlds was himself the originator, in 1911, of a, Bill designed to introduce a system of proportional representation, which might well have been described as “An Act to Wipe Out the Country Quota and Increase the Representation of the Urban at the -Expense of the Rural Population.” By throwing three or four of the existing electorates into one electorate, returning as many members as were previously elected ior such constituencies and adopting the proportional voting system, the election of a minority candidate would become an actual certainty, and it would thus he possible to defeat the wishes of the majority, which, in country constituencies, are apt to run |cm different lines to the desires of city electors. In the still undeveloped state lit the country, with so much to be di’ne in the way of opening up roads, bridging rivers, building railways, and providing other facilities for settlement, it is of the first importance that the rural constituencies should not have their representation curtailed, as it would be if the wishes of the majority in such constituencies were set on one side in the supposed interests of the minority. Proportional representation can only do what is claimed for it—that is, give efficient and proportionate representation to every Party in the State —under conditions that are practically impossible, or that, alternatively. destroy the .personal equation in political life by irtaking the voting a purely individual matter. Electoral divisions returning a large number of members arc, the advocates of the system .say, required for the effective vorking of the system. In his Bill, introduced last session, Mr Veitch made inov'isdon for four electoral divisions—two ;u the North Island, each returning 21 members, and two in the South Island, Upturning 17 members in each case. ’ Ob vjously such a system would shut out m en with local knowledge and experience, ynd would result in the

setting up of party “bosses” controlling the political machinery of the particular party in whose interests they would he working, and the host organised and most perfectly drilled party in machine politics, would control the situation. With such large divisions, and so great an aggregate vote the quota required to secure election would be such that the minor parties in the State could only hope to gain representation in Parliament by transferring their votes to some other Party, because their representatives would be the first to ho ruled out of the count. With 40 or 50 candidates standing for, say, 21 seats in one electoral division totalling perhaps anything frqm 180,000 to 200,000 electors, the quota required to secure a candidate’s return would range somewhere between 8000 and 9000 and could only he secured (apart from the machine vote, and perhaps not even then) by men well-known in public life. Candidates who possessed all the requisite knowledge of the particular district in which they were resident, would be swamped by the votes recorded in favour of the candidates supported by the party bosses, under the political machine that already exists so far as one party is concerned, and there would, moreover, he an end to the intimate relationships that prevail between a member and bis constituents under the single electorate system. In his attack upon the Government Air Mac Donald, while assailing the existing system of representation, failed to develop any convincing argument in favour of a change, and during the whole course of the debate no single member of the 11 ouse adduced a cogent reason for changing the existing system, other than that, it (allegedly) worked in the interests of the Reform Party. When it, worked the other way about nothing was said, and as the “Standard” lias pointed out on more than one occasion, those who are now urging a change from the single electorate to electoral divisions, stoutly declared that the will of the majority—majority rule—must and should prevail. The acceptance by the Lyttelton Times of the Hon. George powlds, as an authority on the supposed beneficial effects of the proportional voting system by no moans improves the position for Mr Mac Donald and his friends. It simply marks a further attempt to gull the public upon the real issues involved.