How Fiji Is Ruled

Evolution of Constitutional System, from being Wholly Nominative to Partly Elective ---

Editorial Note. —In View

of the growing demand in New Guinea for some form of elective Council to aid the Administrator, the following details of the Fijian system are interesting. ---

From Our Own Correspondent SUVA, November 26.

THE Legislative Council of Fiji represents a certain step which is always reached in the evolution of a Crown Colony. After cession, Fiji started with a Governor and a small Council of heads of departments as his advisers. The next step came when a number of the colonists were nominated by the Governor to sit on this Advisory Council ; but a few years before the war, a system of elective representation was adopted, under which the Colonists elected seven members to represent them.

Post-war developments have been mainly on the lines of providing representation for the increasing Indian section of our population.

Nowadays the Legislative Council consists of six European elected members, three Fijian nominated and three Indian elected members. The franchise for both European and Indian electors is on the basis of property and income.

The Fijian members are selected by the Governor from a list of six names sent to him by the Great Council of Chiefs. It is a rather pleasant fiction to consider them as able to exercise an independent judgment; but, in practice.

they are to all intents and purposes Government nominees and nearly always holders or ex-holders of posts in the Government.

To balance these 12 representatives of the Colonists, there are 12 Civil Servants, nominated by the Governor and approved by the Secretary of State. The Governor sits as President of the Council and thus there is an official majority.

The system of government is a good one and is rather like the benevolent despotism under which England flourished in the time of Henry VIII.

The elections are held three years, the next being due in 1932.

The three Indian members elected in 1929 resigned shortly afterwards, because they disapproved of the system under which European, Fijian and Indian communities were divided into compartments, each represented by members of its own race. However, the “common roll controversy” has rather faded into the background, and we hope that at the next elections, in 1932, some of the Indian agriculturists will offer themselves for election, so that this very important section of the colonists in Fiji may have their voices heard in the Legislative Council. ... ===