WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taihape Daily Times, 14 February 1918, Page 4

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

ELECTORAL, REFORM. HOW NEW ZEALAND STANDS* (Special Correspo^nt.) WELLINGTON, Feb 13. Probably one of the effects of the recent compromise between the two Houses of the Imperial Parliament by which a committee is being set up to prepare a scheme for electing a hundred members of the House of Commons upon the principle of proportional representation, will be to stimulate agitation for. electoral reform in this country. New Zealand with its universal suffrage, one-elector-one-vote and nominally equal electorates, has taken such a prominent part in

democratising parliamentary representation a majority of the people are inclined to think that they have achieved perfection and nothing humanly practicable remains to bo done. This,, of course, is not the place to discuss, how far they are right or how far they are wrong, but the time may not be inopportune for showing, without, trenching upon the party question all, how the system of single electorates has failed to give the great massof them an equitable share of representation.

VOTES AND SEATS

For the sake of convenience the titles ‘Reform’- and ‘Liberal-Labour» may be retained to, represent the two parties that contested Vue last general election, but they will be used in a.

purely non-partisan and impersonal sense. Of the 513,907 valid votes polled, 243,476 were cast for Reform candidates and 279,431 for LiberalLabour candidates. If each party had

secured representation in exact proportion to the number of votes it polled the Reform Party would have returned thirty-six members and the Liberal-Labour party forty membersto a House of seventy-six. But as a. matter of fact the Reform Party, with the smaller number of votes, returned thirty-nine members w-hile the Liberal Labour Party, with the largeer number only thirty-seven. Briefly, one party secured three members more than its fair share of representation and the other three members less.

AN INEFFICIENT SYSTEM.

This result, however, does not illustrate the full inefficiency of the single electorate system. There were in* equities all over the country, but tbtP errors in one batch of constituencies counter-acted the errors in another batch. In the twenty constituencies forming the southern portion of the North Island, for instance, 65,810 votes were cast for Liberal-Labour candidates and 64,906 for Reform candidates. This left the Liberal-Labour Party with a majority of 1004 votes, and an equal division of the twenty seats obviously should have resulted. But under the single electorate system only six seats went to the Lib-eral-Labour Party and fourteen to the Reform Party. This Injustice to tEe majority in the southern portion of the North Island, however, was more than balanced by its unique success in the northern portion of the South Island. Here 78,914 votes were polled for Liberal-Labour candidates and 52,355 for Reform candidates. A fair division of the representation would have been twelve Liberal-Labour members and eight Reform members, but the actual result was sixteen and four respectively. WASTAGE. These results may have been due in some small measure to the operation of the “country quota” and to the lack of organisation on one side or t>}|b other, but there can be no question they arose mainly from inherent deficits in the system itself. Of the 515,907 votes polled, 289,177 were cast for successful candidates and 226,730 for unsuccessful candidates. : The electors who voted for unsuccess- | ful candidates got no representation of any kind, and even this did not represent the full extent of the wastage. Of the 289,177 votes cast for succesful candidates, 74,622 were not required, that is the candidates they favoured would hdve been returned without their assistance. Only 214,555 votes were necessary to return the successful candidates, so that in addition to the 226,739 votes given to unsuccessful candidates there were 74,622 surplus votes given to successful candidates, a total wastage of 301,353 votes. That, briefly, is New Zealand’s latest experience of its own electoral system and it must he confessed the contemplation of its results Is not particularly edifying.