WANTED: SPOKESMEN FOR NELSON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 14 August 1944, Page 4

WANTED: SPOKESMEN FOR NELSON

ON Friday our Parliamentary representative reported that Mr H. Atmore, member for Nelson, had asked a question in the House about the direction of Mr John Hogan away from his professional duties as editor of a weekly paper to work in an essential industry. On the same page of “The Mail” appeared an encouraging survey of opportunities for rehabilitating ex-servicemen on the tobacco lands of Nelson, the speaker being the Hon. E. R. Davis. M.L.C., (Auckland). This is one but not an isolated example of how advocacy of the claims of Nelson to a proper share in schemes for future progress is left to outside members of the Legislature or not made at all. No one suggests that a member of Parliament, once elected, should be instructed about how he should act or what he should say, but Nelson is in sore need of men who will bring the district, its handicaps and its potentialities more prominently before the House and the country than is being done to-day or has been done for some years past. Parliament is the forum in which such advocacy should be heard and nobody except our elected representatives has the privilege of undertaking it.

Mr C. F. Skinner, member for Motuefca, and Minister of Rehabilitation, may feel disposed to eschew any semblance of parochialism while discharging national duties but that is no reason why Motueka electorate should suffer, if, in fact, it does. Mr Atmore has always been noted for his assiduity in looking after the interests of individual electors when they have made reasonable requests to him but he seems to have forgotten that he is the chief spokesman for us in the Dominion’s Parliament. What a refreshing change it would be if, in the present Budget debate (where much latitude is permitted), Mr Atmore were to take as his main theme, not currency reform or Russia, but the needs and possibilities for expansion in the northern part of the South Island. Whatever breadth of statesmanlike outlook a member of Parliament may pride himself on possessing, he should not forget that politics begins at honle.