Votes for — What?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 18

Votes for — What?

OLITICS? ... Let’s talk about something more interesting. . . No, I shan’t bother to vote. . . Don’t see what difference my one vote would make, | anyway... 2VEN on the eve of an election it’s a pretty prevalent attitude-how prevalent you realise when you hear in the election: post-mortems how many of all those entitled to vote didn’t bother; didn’t bother even when everything was done to make it easy for them. Anthony Bartlett took a conversation round just such an attitude as this for his starting point when he wrote Power Through the Ballot Box: A Programme for Electors, which is to be heard on Monday, November 8-from 2YC at 7.15 p.m., and from 4YC at 8.15! p.m. The whole programme, in fact, is really a conversation piece between the complacent nonvoter, point of view and the point of view that the single vote withheld does make a difference. "Of course it makes a difference," says one of the characters in the programme, who starts it all off by laying down the law about political canvassing. "The whole structure of the country is ‘based on the individual’s political responsibility-his, or her, right (continued on next page) !

to vote. If you don’t vote then, to a certain extent, you put the whole thing in jeopardy." But Powét Dhrou helt Ballot Box is more than ~ jiist ‘afiother argument about politics, for in the effort to explain just why the vote should be valued it goes back to the Athenians, who not only organised the first working democracy we know very much about, but were probably the first people ever to think much about politics. And having gone back to Athens it comes forward again, noting as it goes some of the steps the people have taken as they have won by slow stages the power they now. have over their rulers. And it wasn't, ‘of course, a. steady. forward march. For a start, though the Greeks

thought out the basic ideas of politics -the_ relationships between man and man-the democracy didn’t endure; and their work, the inquiring spirit that was embodied in it, lay dormant until the Renaissance.. Then it had the greatest

effect on European thought and the development of our modern ideas. This dialogue on democracy traces the development of English political institutions down to the Reform Bills’ of the 19th Century and Lord Durham’s report on the troubles in Canada. And since the responsible representative in‘stitutions he recommended for Canada were made more or less the. Prototype for similar institutions elsewhere that is where the dialogue takes up the story of our own institutions in New Zealand -from the provincial governments and restricted franchise of the early days to the last attempt by the Crown (in 1892) to reject a decision made by the Lower House, and the granting of votes to women a year later. And in passing it explains why the ramifications of Government are so wide here, which makes it all the more important for everyone to take an interest-an intelligent in-terest-in the election of the people who will represent them in "the House on the Hill."