WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 July 1921, Page 9

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

> WELLINGTON’S FINANCES. AN UNPLEASANT PREDICAMENT. (Special Correspondent.) Wellington ratepayers are beginning to realise the significance -of the statement concerning the city’s finances the new Mayor placed before the council last week. Mr. Wright’s task cannot have been a pleasant one. Duriug the early stages of the mayoral election campaign wnich resulted in his easy victory over the Labor candidate, Mr. P. Hickey, he was opposed by the Hou. W. T. Hislop, a former mayor and at one time a Minister of the Crown. Mr. Hislop had been impelled to enter the contest by a strong conviction that all was not well with the finances of the city, and his platform speeches were devoted mainly to a scathing overhaul of the municipal accounts fur which he held the. Mayor, now Sir John Luke, primarily and Mr. Wright largely responsible. To what extent Mr. Wright was to blame for the conditions alleged by his critic was not made quite clear, but in the promotion of his candidature the “citizens’ nominee” thought it necessary to defend his friend and himself from the strictures of this extremely vigorous veteran.

THEN CANDIDATE, NOW REPRE-

SENTATIVE.

A very large part of Mr, Wright’s own speeches were devoted to an attempt to show that everything in the council’s financial garden was lovely and that the accounts presented not the slightest occasion for anxiety. The electors, as many a more distinguished politician than the present Mayor has discovered, always prefer an optimist to a pessimist, and when it came to a question of consolidating the “Moderates” against the “Extremists,” an order that the administration of the affairs of the city should not fall into the inexperienced and reckless hands of Labor, Mr. Hislop was induced by very high influence to retire from the contest and thus leave Mr. Wright alone to avert the impending catastrophe. It was a veritable triumph of electioneering tactics. But now the new Mayor, were he not a born tighter, might be regretting his success. He is beset by a whole sea of trouble from * which he can scarcely hope to emerge before the end of his term of office. He has begun well, however, by justifying his discarded opponent in the eyes of the electors.

CHANGING TIMES. J '*

Praise for himself from the Welfare League probably will be regarded by Mr. Robert Semple with the suspicion proverbially accorded tp gifts from the Greeks, but really it does honor to the little band of progressing thinkers among the capitalists who are honestly trying to draw employers and employees closer together. “We appreciate the plainness of this speech,” it says in its comments upon Mr. Semple’s recent address to the workers, “and we hope that some equally plain spoken advocate will arise amongst the employers who will fearlessly proclaim that capitalists must have some sort of social, conscience. It is the men without conscience, both amongst capitalists and workers, who are playing the deuce with the world today.” Credit is due to Mr. Semple for his courage in putting very plain truths to the men of his own class. In facing the problem in a practical-minded way, Mr. Semple and his colleagues are doing good service to the whole community.” People who have known Mr. Semple intimately for years maintain it is no change in his ideals and aspirations that has brought about this appreciation, but a very radical change in the point of view of the more observant among his former critics. SAMOA. The somewhat precipitate departure of the Minister of External Affairs for Samoa does not forbode any alarming crisis in the “foreign policy” of the Dominion. The Hon. E. P. Lee is visiting the most important of New Zealand’s “dependencies” in the partial fulfilment of a promise made during last session that the Prime Minister and he would make a. tour of the islands during the recess. The Imperial Conference has swallowed up Mr. Massey, and his colleague is making the trip alone rather in discharge of a social obligation than with any idea of dealing with great questions of State. He is accompanied by Mrs. Lee, whose inclusion' in a mission of this kind probably will impress the native mind more than anything else will, Mr. E. N. G. Poulton, the most capable of private secretaries, and Mr. J. D. Cray, the permanent head of the External Affairs Department, who has many of the qualities required in a Foreign Secretary, including a. cheery personality which already has made its irresistible appeal to the Samoans. Mr. Lee will return by way of Sydney and while there will confer with the Australian authorities upon a number of island questions in which both the Commonwealth and the Dominion are concerned.