The Timaru Herald. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 1879.

Timaru Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 1342, 8 January 1879, Page 2

The Timaru Herald. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 1879.

If there is one subject more than another upon which Sir George Grey professes to feel strongly, it is that of plurality of votes by right of property. He makes the most' extraordinary statements on this point whenever he addresses the public, but never takes the smallest pains to explain what he means by them, or to put the question before I his hearers in anything like a fair or | candid manner. Times out of number he has declared that some men have forty-five votes each, and have power to elect a whole County Council ; but we venture to say that, out of the thon- I eands who have got excited and burst ! oat into indignant applause over this assertion, and the deductions which the , Premier draws from it, scarcely on©

has really understood whether it is true or not. As a matter of fact, it has, like too many more of the Premier's stock statements, only the color of truth. What Sir George Grey means is that, m a County containing nine rulings, there may be a man who owns property m each riding, which is rated sufficiently highly to entitle him to the maximum number of votes, namely, five. Five votes m each riding would thus give the fortunate owner of all this property, the mystic number of fortyfive votes m the whole county. That such a case is possible, we admit at once ; but that such a case exists m more than a single instance from one end of the colony to the other, we do not believe for a moment. What then, is the use of the Premier arguing from such an extremely improbable hypothesis, unless he wishes deliberately to create a false impression ? He is palpably inaccurate m his facts, to begin with ; but even if he were right m his facts, even if it were a common thing, as he represents it to be, for a single person to own an immense property m each riding of a county, the deductions which he draws from that fact are wildly incorrect. He declares that the possession of forty-five votes m a county gives a man the power to elect the whole Council. The gross exaggeration of this assertion is, of course, obvious, because even if all the fortyfive votes could be plumped for particular Councillors, they would not necessarily be returned. The votes cannot be plumped or exercised en bloc, however, for the simple reason that only five of them can be recorded m each riding, or m favor of any particular candidate. Sir George Grey's denunciation of landowners with forty-five votes, therefore, proves upon examination to be pure moonshine, without a vestige of substantial ground to rest upon. He carefully keeps m the background, too, that the more votes a man has, the more-rates he has to pay ; or, what is still more to the point, that, though he cannot have more than five votes m one riding, he may be rated upon any value at which his property may be assessed. The hypothetical landowner, with five votes m each riding, and forty-five m the whole county, would necessarily have to pay a large proportion of the whole county rate, and might have to bear the whole of it. Seeing that local rates, unlike the general taxation, are drawn entirely from property, and are expended entirely for the common benefit of all property within the area rated, it is only common justice that the local franchise should bear some proportion to the amount of rates contributed. If it bore a full proportion to it, there might be cause for complaint, because m that case, the large proprietors would really be In a position to control the local elections. As it is, however, the voting power is only proportionate to the amount of rates contributed, up to the number of five ; and, af ter that number is reached, the rating may go up to any amounS without the proprietor obtaining a single additional vote. As a matter of fact, the large proprietors pay the bulk of the local rates, but the small proprietors indisputably have the elections practically m then- own hands. The recent election of a member of the Waimate County Council, is a case m point, There one of the largest ratepayers m the County, backed by almost all the rest of his class, was defeated at a County election, by the numbers of small individual ratepayers who voted against him. The single owner of a large estate, indeed, is at the greatest disadvantage at a County election, because he can only poll five votes ; whilst a number of persons jointly interested m an estate of less value, perhaps, than his, and paying less rates, can poll five votes each, or ten, twenty, fifty votes among them. We do not suppose that Sir George Grey understands all this, or knows anything really, about local elections. Although a very wealthy man himself, and one of the haughtiest of proprietors, he is, nevertheless, almost the only European m New Zealand who pays no local taxes. Kawau is not m any County or Road District, and, though an exceedingly valuable property, is not rated at all. Sir George is certainly the only man m this country to whom his violent tirades against autocratic owners of estates would properly apply. Though he has no practical knowledge of the working of local institutions, however, he might at least take the trouble to examine the law on the subject, or make enquiries of those who are familiar with its operation, before committing himself to such utterly erroneous expressions of opinion concerning it. In the course of his recent speech at the Thames, he let out m his usual fashion about the plural voting, and about " owners of vast estates" electing whole County Councils with.their forty-five votes. He did more, and lie did what was very rash. He not only denounced the system which prevails under the existing law ; but he propounded, with more or less particularity, a scheme of his own to supersede it. The Premier is notoriously weak m details, and he altogether failed to place his plan before his audience m a practical shape ; but he yet etated it with sufficient distinctness to let the public know what sort of rating he would like to have. He proposes that the rates should be levied, not on the value, but on the acreage of land, and that each ratepayer shall only have one vote. Here again, as m everything that this singular politician says, crops out his hatred for the rural population. The object of such a scheme as this is obvious. It is to give the dwellers m and aboutthe towns the absolute control of the local affairs of the country. According to this scheme, a country village even, containing two or three hundred quarter acre allotments, would have the whole voting power of the riding, while contributing no more to the rates than one small farm. A farmer with a thousand acres would pay a thousand times as much m rates as eight cottagers living on a sub-divided acre m the village; but they would have eight votes to his

one. The effect of such a system would, no doubt, be exactly what Sir George Grey anticipates from it. Persons with no stake m the country at all would elect their own men to the local governing bodies, and would rate the owners | of property as highly as possible, and I spend the money just as they pleased. So far, so good. But, m a year's time, * everybody with anything to lose would have fled the country, or the law would be immediately altered, or it would be set at defiance and riots and bloodshed would ensue. We do not say that this last result, also, would be quite m accordance with the Premier's wishes ; though to judge from many of his speeches, we should not be far wrong if we said so. It would unquestionably follow, however, on the establishment of such a system of local tyranny as he openly advocated at the Thames. Sir George Grey, though nobody hugs property more tenaciously, or accumulates it with more avidity than he does, yet has the most unreasonable hatred of property belonging to anybody else. His one idea is to place all power m the hands of men who have nothing, and to direct it against those •who have landed possessions, or wealth of any kind. He is unable to go so far as to say that to have any land or money is m itself a crime ; so he says the next thing to it by declaring that land or money is generally acquired by crime. Not his land and money, be it observed, but everybody else's. Thus, after propounding his scheme of local rating the other night, he went on to show how money is " acquired fraudulently, extravagantly, and by mean habitß m various ways;" which was equivalent to saying that the owners of property are scoundrels ; and added that "to acquire money by plurality of votes is one of the worst ways by which power can be acquired, and these are the disreputable ways by which power is acquired m the present day." No one knows better than Sir George Grey how to wrap up a bad meaning m fair sounding wox'ds ; but we believe we can discern the real drift of this curious passage. "What he meant to convey to his hearers was that the propertied class, having, by fraud or avarice, acquired money, buy land with it, obtain a plurality of votes by virtue of that property ; and then misappropriate the rates to their own purposes. That, stripped of all verbiage, is the account which the Premier of New Zealand gives of the manner m which our local institutions operate at present ! All that we can say is that, if he is m his right mind, he has a greater aptitude for elaborately malicious slander, than any man we ever met with. When we remember, too, that he has been m a position to do away with plural voting if he chose ; that he was invited and challenged to do it last session; and that he would not take any step m that direction, his utter insincerity becomes more painfully evident than ever.