REDUCTION OF PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATION.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 761, 1 October 1886, Page 20

REDUCTION OF PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATION.

The Herald's New Zealand correspondent tells us (Sydney Mail) that in that colony there is a fast growing desire to reduce the number of members, and also to lessen the localism and scrambling for grants of money, by returning to the practice of large electorates. It is .curious that this should be the tendency in a neighbouring colony, when in our own the whole movement has been the other way. YV ith us the Assembly is continually enlarging under the operation of the expansive system fixed by the la3t Eleeto al Act, and at the time the Act was passed there was uo mistaking the popular desire to subdivide electorates as much as possible. The reason for that desire was not political, but financial. The people in the country districts had a notion that one member was more directly responsible to them than one of three, and that their wants would be more definitely looked after. It is, therefore, the scramble for public money that makes small electorates popular. In New Zealand they have had about enough of this scramble. They have nearly got to the end of their borrowing tether, while the Colony is more heavily taxed than any other. The politicians, however, especially those of the Vogel stamp, have still no other patent for governing their borrowi ing and distributing the proceeds—in other words, securing political support by brib- ; ing the constituencies. Bad times have stimulated an earnest desire for so 1 much political reform as shall stop ' extravagance, and the reaction in favor of fewer members and larger constituencies coaaea out of the conviction that such a change will somewhat mitigate the scramble ; and now that there is little more to be got, everybody can afford to repent and reform.