RAGLAN BY-ELECTION.

Waikato Times, Volume 102, Issue 17222, 4 October 1927, Page 8

RAGLAN BY-ELECTION.

THE REFORM REVERSE. A DISCONCERTING REBUFF. ITS SIGNIFICANCE. (Special Correspondent.) WELLINGTON, Monday. Now that the newspapers have done their best to explain the reverse suffered by the Reform Party in the Raglan by-election, and the party itself has striven to belittle the success of Labour, it is plain enough for everybody to see that the Government has sustained a very disconcerting rebuff in one of the strongest of its strongholds. The local papers urged half-a-dozen excuses’’-for the failure of the Government’s candidate, in which, most ungraciously, the inexperience and incapacity of the poor man himself was included; but their conclusions, to put it mildly were ludicrously inconsistent with the obvious facts. The total votes polled at the by-elec-tion last week were 1221 fewer than the total polled at the general election in 1925, the figures falling from 7271 to 6050, the total votes cast for the Reform candidate declining by 2445, and the votes for the three candidates for the other three parties represented at the general election increasing by 102 G. In addition to the Labour, Liberal, and Country Party candidates there was an Independent Reform candidate in the flel i last week, and the 198 votes cast for this gentleman brought the total votes arrayed against the selected Reform candidate up to 4035, leaving the Government’s nominee in a minority of 2000, or with little more than one-third of the votes polled. A Lame Excuse. The Evening Post, with less than its usual perception and no logic at all, declared, in effect, that the return of the Labour candidate was due to the miscarriage of a defective system of election. “Either on a second ballot, with which at the instance of Sir Joseph Ward, the country experimented in 1908 and 1911,” it said, “or under the proportional system which the Labour Party favours, the victory of the Reform candidate would have been certain.” The Post assumes, of course, that if there had been no Liberal candidate in the field the 1905 supporters of Mr Parker would have cast their votes for the Reform candidate; but no one who has followed the trend of party feeling in the country during the last year or two will assume anything of the kind. Observant people know better. Nor would the votes for the Country Party or the Independent candidate have passed automatically to the Reform candidate had either of these gentlemen, or both of them elected to retire. Three or four weeks ago a bank manager addressing a gathering of farmers in the Waikato district gave it as his considered opinion that a Labour Government would do more for men on the land than the present Government was doing. A responsible authority of this kind would know his audience. The Prime Minister's Optimism. The statement made by the Prime Minister to the Press on the day following the election was characteristic of the delightful optimist who is content to wait with Micawberian complacency for something to turn up. “The resuft of the Raglan by-elec-tion,” Mr Coates told the reporters, “is due to vote-splitting on the part of those opposed to the policy of the Labour Party. The aggregate of the votes cast against the successful Labour candidate shows that the great majority in the electorate arc definitely opposed to the principles and policy of the Labour-Socialists. The seat lias gone to the Labour Party on a minority vote, but 1 predict with confidence that to-day’s verdict will he reversed at tt)c General Election, provided that there are not too many candidates anxious to demonstrate their opposition to llic principles of the Socialistic Party. I feel sure that one result of Ibis contest will be to consolidate the forces in Hie community which arc definitely opposed to the platform of the Labour Party.” These are very plausible generalities, but they do not account for the decline of the Reform vote in less than two years by 2445, from 4470 to 2025, nor do they make it at all clear why the Liberals and the Country Party should efface themselves for the 'purpose of staying the debacle. , Vote Splitting. The Prime Minister and his colleagues have no more right to be calling out against votesplitting than have the local papers. Mr Coates must be aware that it was a minority of the electors of the Dominion that _ gave him his overwhelming majority in the present House of Representatives, and he cannot have forgotten that only a week or two ago he and his big battalions arrayed themselves against a Bill, introduced by Me J. McCombs, the Labour member for Lyttelton, which aimed at preventing the wasteage of votes he now' professes to deplore. The lion. F. .1. ltolleston, the Attorney-General, and Mr J. A. Young, the Minister of Health, with a somewhat broader conception of popular representation than ha/1 their chief, dared to vote for the principal of Mr McCombs’ Bill, and for their courage w’erc severely taken to task by the Dominion, which went the length of implying that they had been disloyal to their party. For the Prime Minister himself there always is the excuse that he has not yet made himself acquainted with Hie details of more than one system of election, and that the less chivalrous members of his party prefer the bridge that has carried them safely over an election to one that might test their right of passage more severely.