PARTIES AND PLEDGES.

Waipa Post, Volume 37, Issue 2227, 27 October 1928, Page 4

PARTIES AND PLEDGES.

THE Ministerial candidate for Rotorua, Mr F. F. Hockley, is reported to have stated in his opening address that “he made no platform pledges, but! stood for Reform.” Mr Hockley is a prominent and very capable member of the Reform Party, and t'he statement we have just quoted means (says the Christchurch Press) that he is pledged to his Party platform only, and will not! give up his freedom to deal as he!, thinks best with subjects outside that platform when they come up for consideration in some concrete form. This is the attitude which an increasing number of people of all Parties will approve in any candidate. Various organisations, from Prohibitionists to motorists, from manufacturers to supporters of Bible-teaching in schools, have been making up their minds to ask candidates for pledges of support for their particular proposals. If a request for fixed plejdges has any meaning at all, it is that the organisation making it would regard as valueless all the virtues in any candidate unwilling to meet its requirements in t'he one particular. Nobody would dispute the freedom of any candidate to declare himself a wholehearted opponent of high tariffs, or of Prohibition, or of purely secular teaching in the schools, or of anything else. But a candidate who pledges himself to vote in a particular way on any detail of a possible Bill dealing with any particular question which is not in his Party’s platform is likely to make trouble for himself or his Party. And what is worse, he is encouraging, by his •giving of such pledges, the promotion of partlcu'larist interests above the general interest of the nation.