South Wales, a bill had already been introduced by Mr. Wentworth, giving effect to Hare's system. . . . . He thought it desirable that minorities should be represented. Take a constituency with 2,100 voters. It seemed very hard that a moiety of the constituency with one or two votes over should have the power to send into Parliament a member to represent the whole of the constituency, when nearly one half of them would not be represented. It was said that it was wrong to make the experiment now, when it had not been adopted by the Imperial Parliament He had great respect for the House of Commons, but, if the principle was a philosophical one, the fact of its not being introduced at home was no reason why it should not be tried here. It was also urged that it was not a perfect principle, but it was useless to aim at perfection, for some fraction of the minority must always be unrepresented.
Mr. Heales objected to the attempted application of the principle to particular districts only. There was no class of the community to whom he would give advantages which others could not enjoy. If the power of concentrating their votes should be given to the voters of certain districts it would be unjust, and give one set of voters an unfair advantage over others. He was opposed, moreover, to the principle of the representation of minorities.
Mr. J. T. Smith opposed the clause. In the district which he represented three members were returned, and the effect of the clause would be injurious to it. Were it divided into three portions, and each port allowed a member, it might be represented as a whole; but to give an inconsiderable minority, perhaps not numbering one-twelfth of the whole body of electors, the privilege of returning a member who would vote in opposition to the other two, was practically to reduce the representation of the district to a single member.
Mr. Wood said that if the Legislature once laid down a correct principle that was a veiy important thing, even though it were attended with no great practical results. He was not affected by the argument that this was a small experiment, applying to four constituencies only. It was for the political philosopher to lay down a great scheme, and it was for the practical man to test that scheme. The hon. member for East Bourke had said that minorities did occasionally return representatives, even under the existing system, by what was commonly called plumping. This was, however, a mere matter of chance; it could only happen where the majority was divided. The same hon. member had also told the committee that under the present system there was a representation of a variety of opinions; that the colony was divided into various interests—mining, agricultural, and town interests; but the hon. member seemed to have overlooked the fact that the same class might be predominant in every instance—that the majority, in every instance, might hold the same set of political opinions. To take the question of protection, for example. There might, probably, be a majority in the towns in favour of protection; and they all knew that in the agricultural constituencies, the farmers, and probably the labourers, were also in favour of
