LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Evening Star, Issue 19792, 16 February 1928, Page 16

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

THE KERNEL OF DEMOCRACY ADDRESS BY UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR [Special to the * Star.’] CHRISTCHURCH, February 15. In the course of his address at the New Zealand University Council, the Chancellor (Professor J. MacMillan Brown) said: “ Education should not cease with the school, or even with the university. It is as important for the men and women of the community, if the Government in a self-governing community is to be real. We acknowledge this in the university extension system. This tries to give to workers some of the general education they may have missed by not going on to a university institution. But there is, in a self-governing community,, the need of some training in the duties of an electorate, and this can only be had in the election of local bodies. Our journals are their tutors on the questions that are put before them by the various candidates. There is altogether too little attention paid to the education of electors in their special duties as electors, and the result is that they do not take these duties seriously enough. A large proportion of them fail to fulfil them, even in the choice of Members of Parliament. The only school there is for a parliamentary electorate is the recurrent elections for service on local bodies. Still more important are these local boards for the training and choice of our legislators. ‘ Without them few of these candidates would have any training in the art of discovering public needs, or in that of making rules and laws to meet them. Without them the electors would have little means of distinguishing between candidates and candidates, and would have to take most of them at their own valuation. Tt would Jbo disastrous to a democratic community to have this

school of the legislators and electors ruined. The true friends of education, as well as of good government, should be the last to think of curtailing the duties and authority of the system of local government. It is the first essential of a democracy, such as all our dominions are. This, it seems to me, is one of the main reasons why this central university body should uphold the dignity of the constituent colleges, and refuse to establish an inspectorate, such as might lead to interference with the authority of their governing bodies.”