THE'SOUTHERN MAORI ELECTORATE.

Free Lance, Volume XVII, Issue 920, 1 March 1918, Page 10

THE'SOUTHERN MAORI ELECTORATE.

A Pocket Borough. MR. Uru has been elected for the Southern Maori district, and Mr. Massey gets an additional supporter. It is true that Mr. Uru is to support the National Government, but if he is true to his old political associations he will, unless wei are much mistaken, openly throw in his political lot with the Reform Party after the war, or whenever the existing so-called party true comes to an end. The one side of the election, however, which interests us is the light it throws upon the rank absurdity of this Southern Maori electorate existing, as a separate entity, at all. The votes recorded were a little over 600, and the victor only polled a miserable 242.

What a farce all this is, and what a scandalous state of affairs it is that some 600 odd Maori electors should have the same (reflected) power in Parliament as would have the 10,000 or more electors of the ordinary Exiropean constituency! This farce has gone on quite long enough and should be ended once and for all by the merging of the South Island Maoris into either the Western or Eastern Maori electorate. The day may come—perhaps' sooner than is generally imagined—when the fate of a Ministry and a Government may depend upon Mr. Uru's vote —the vote of a man who represents but a mere handful of electors. Meanwhile, the Cook Islands people, some 10,000 souls, have no Parliamentary representative at all. This state of affairs should certainly be altered before the next general election.