PULLING THE WIRES

Observer, Volume XXII, Issue 51, 6 September 1902, Page 2

PULLING THE WIRES

How Elections Arc Worked

THE goldfields township of Waihi furnished a significant example

last week of how the political strings are pulled and elections are worked. Two individuals, by name Asher and Allsop, drove over from Tauranga for the purpose of forming a branch of the Liberal and Labour Federation at Waihi, with a view to the coming elections. It was not very clear who-.h ad sent them, or how. tljeir expenses were paid, but, seeing tjiat Mr Seddon is the active head.oi Ijhe Federation, and that it employe an untiring ..organizer, it is reasoDpbje, to ftsauuw; that they did not act without authority.

When the meeting was assembled, and its purposes explained, the conveners stated that Mr Lundon had been chosen- as the Government candidate for the seat. In other words, Waihi was expected to accept Mr Lundon as its member lest a greater evil might befall it in the person of Mr Herries. But, singularly enough, not a word was said about Mr Jackson Palmer, the sitting member for the town. And, if we mistake not, the miners of Waihi and the whole of the Upper Thames are under a debt of gratitude to Mr Jackson Palmer which scarcely justified them in forgetting him while the delegates from Tauranga were unfolding their plans and forcing a member of their own choosing on Waihi.

When the miners were involved in fcheir dispute before the Conciliation Board, Mr Jackson Palmer left his business in Auckland, and devoted himself for several months to the cause of the miners who were his constituents. He accompanied the court to the several mining centres, at the sacrifice of much time and money, and indifferent to the powerful interests whose hostility he was arousing. Have the miners of the Upper Thames, or indeed any part of the Peninsula, forgotten that? If so, they are indeed ungrateful. There was not another member of the House who would have stuck to his constituents in their trouble as Mr Jackson Palmer did. And yet an assemblage of miners in Waihi, under the auspices of the Liberal and Labour Federation, sat meekly in their seats while it was proposed to them that they should accept Mr Lundon, a stranger, as a candidate to unseat Mr Palmer.

It is more than likely that Mr Palmer will not woo the suffrages of Wai hi. His electorate is Ohinemuri, from which Waihi has been separated, and his sympathies being centred in the mining community of the Upper Thames more than in the agricultural and pastoral interests of the Bay of Plenty, it is almost a certainty that he will remain staunch to Ohinemuri. But, all the same, he is still the sitting member for Waihi, and therefore, in view of his cordial sympathy with and practical assistance to the iminers in their protracted trade troubles, they ought in common decency to have been off with the old love before they commenced to coquette with the new.