Getting on the Roll

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 217, 20 August 1943, Page 3

Getting on the Roll

HERE are a hundred reasons why we should make sure that our names are on the roll, each of them (as a wit said on another great occasion). better than the first; and the first is that enrolment is compulsory. That ought to be sufficient for the elector who finds no pleasure in paying fines. But the really important reason for making sure that we are on the right roll before the right day is of course the importance of the approaching election. The men and women chosen next month to represent us in Parliament will almost certainly be the men and women representing us when the war ends. It will fall to them and not to us to say what kind of an end there will be in New Zealand-when our fighting forces will be demobilised, what occupations and homes will be provided for them, and what other opportunities they will be given either to start a new life or to resume where they left off. But the task will be far more complicated than that simple statement of it might suggest. Parliament’s responsibility will start in New Zealand but it will not stop there. It will not rest there for one day. The world we set out to preserve when we entered the war has left us already. Whatever allowances we make for catch-phrases, parrotcries, ignorance, hypocrisy and cant, the new world is here and the old world will not come back. That would be true for us in New Zealand if the world began and ended in the Pacific Ocean, as more and more it will for most of us as the years go on; but we have to be fitted into a more complex pattern than that, and next month’s representatives will at least begin that task. In any case the man who cannot be bothered to select just rulers will be getting what he deserves if he finds himself groaning under unjust laws.