The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1912. PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 121, 9 October 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1912. PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION.

The fate of the Legislative Council still hangs in the balance, and much of the discussion about the Prime Minister's resolution is centreing around the suggestion that the establishment of large constituencies would give the rich candidate an advantage over a poor one. This has been forcibly denied by both the Prime Minister and the Minister for Labor during the debate on the "resolutions," and in support of their .contention they quoted the result of the last elections for the Commonwealth Senate. But they appear to have overlooked a far more important deduction that might have been drawn from the figures. There were three members to be elected by each of the States voting as one constituency, and the Labor Party secured the whole of the seats. Mr. Massey and Mr. Fisher professed to sec in this only an effective answer to some of the critics of proportional representation who had urged that large constituencies would give an unfair advantage to the candidates who could afford to spend money in getting about the country and personally canvassing the electors. But the figures were not so conclusive on this point as thev would have had the House believe. A great wave of Labor enthusiasm was passing over the country at the time of the elections, helped along by a number of Liberals who did not join in the Liberal-Conservative fusion, and yet the Labor vote exceeded the non-Labor vote by only 24,001, in a total voting of 4,051,119. It might easily be argued from these figures that big constituencies do give some advantages to wealth. In the larger States the Labor sentiment at the time was just as pronounced as it was in the smaller Stales; yet in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales, taken together, there was actually a majority of some fi.'i.OOO polled against the Party, while in South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania there was a majority of some 59,000 polled in its favor. But the feature of the figures that ought to be appealing to our legislators is the overwhelming evidence they afford of the need for applying proportional representation to the House of Representatives as well as to the Legislative Council. Here we have a fraction

of more than half the electors securing the whole of the representation, with a majority of only half per cent, of the votes polled. Mr. W. P. Reeves, who was, in his political day in New Zealand, a vigorous opponent of proportional representation, commenting upon the figures in an address to the London School of Economics a fevr weeks after they were announced, said that "such results would give rise to revolutions," and really, if the people were not so familiar with the fact, it would be astounding to find British communities bo quietly enduring a system of election whieh almost invariably defeats the very principle it is hortestly intended to enforce. At the present moment we have in New Zealand a Government administering the affairs of the country which cannot by any stretch of either courtesy or imagination be said to be the choice of more than three-eighths of the electors who recorded their votes, at the last election; and yet nobody is talking of "revolution," and the proposals for proportional representation are receiving only a halfhearted support from a dubious minority in Parliament.