Politics and Separation.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume IV, Issue 473, 28 June 1890, Page 2

Politics and Separation.

[NAPIER NEWS SPECIAL - ] Mr W. L. Rees is now definitely announced as a candidate foe-the East Coast seat at the general elec-ion. There is good reason to believe that he could get into a city seat with much more ease and comfort than has to be ' gone through in contesting this wide district but he says it would be against his grain to run away from the East Coast because he has a’ready been defeated. It appears now, so I see from this morning’s paper, that Mr Arthur intends to support Whitmore's Separation Bill, a measure which there was a clever, but unsuccessful, attempt to'force through last session. The Bill has for its object the splitting up of the Cook County into t\vo county districts, when the Waiapu district, of which the Standard calls Sir George Whitmore * the uncrowned king,’ would perhaps be put under a reduced rate, which would make the small taxes there are fall still lighter on Sir George. Roads must of course suffer, but what of that, the properties of Messrs Ormond and Whitmore, and very likely Mr Arthur’s famous Tokomaru block, would be included in the new County. In other words the ‘ cream * of the East Coast land would simply be inaccessible to prying would be settlers, while the little monarchs of the squattocracy, entrenched in their own vast sheep runs, could flit by the seaport whenever they wished to venture out, which is pretty often, I think. At first it was thought the separation of the Counties might galvanise life into the Waiapu portion of the district, whose progress would naturally also be to the advantage of the Southern end, but through an indiscreet utterance of Mr Arthur, the cat has got out in regard to the rating, and people who before never took the trouble to think are naturally now much incensed. It was from the; Waiapu district that the famous block vote came to decide the last election in favor of Mr Arthur; and when that fact is recalled to mind its sheds further lighten another point. The block vote from Waiapu numbered sixty: is it really proposed to make a separate county of a district which only registers 62 votes in the hardest fought election ever known in the p ace? Well, the House will have an opportunity of deciding.