Transport Law

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21290, 9 October 1934, Page 10

Transport Law

lit was decided by the Christchurch i City Council last night to support the Nelson City Council's protest against an undesirable consequence of the transport law ame v dments of 1933; that, namely, which permits the Transport Co-ordination Board to hear appeals against decisions which its own members may have shared in making, while sitting as members of licensing authorities. We have commented before on this situation and on the case which illuminated it recently, and there is no need to go over the same ground again. The council has done right in supporting a very proper objection to legislation which, though undesignedly, compromises the principle that a ji- 'icial body should be unprejudiced an impartial. But it is to be hope that it occurred to some councillors, at least, that what they have condemned at a distance is not very different from what they condone under their noses. When the Christchurch City Council sits as a licensing authority, it frequently has to deal with applications and objections to which the Christchurch Tramway Board is a Ddrty; and men who have stated and shaped the tramway case in one room aie supposed to judge it without bias in another. Ever since the licensing system began to operate, the membership of both bodies has been partly the same. To-dav five-mem-bers of the board are members of the council; and while everybody will acquit them of conscious bias—that is, of deliberately using the opportunity that one position gives them of furthering interests adapted in another—of unconscious bias nobody can acquit them. They cannot even acquit themselves. Their minds are inclined one way in the board room; the inclination does not vanish •as they hang up their hats in the council chamber. It may be said,, of, that for members of a licensing authority to hear appli cations and objections in which they are interested in another capacity is not so seriously anomalous as for members of a final appeal authority to hear appc against their own decisions. Nor is it: but it is serijous enough, and a wisely amended I act would malce both impossible.