The Press FRIDAY, JULY 29, 1938. The Reticence of the Transport Department

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22466, 29 July 1938, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, JULY 29, 1938. The Reticence of the Transport Department

We said of the report of the Transport Department for 1937 that it seemed to show " that the " Minister for Transport and his department are "not anxious to communicate their intentions "or to reveal very much of what they are " doing." The department's latest report, tabled in the House of Representatives this week, invites the same comment. Throughout the last 12 months, as even a cursory examination of our files will show, the activities of the transport licensing authorities, the virtually compulsory sales of certain road transport concerns to the Railway Department, the transport mergers in the Nelson and West Coast districts, and various other aspects of the Government's transport policy, have aroused keen public discussion. That the discussion has not often been informed discussion has been due mainly to the great difficulty of forming any clear picture of what the Transport Department is doing and attempting to do in the sphere of transport regulation and rationalisation. It is natural to look to the report of the Transport Department for reasonably full information on these matters: but anyone who does so will be greatly disappointed. For instance, the vexed question of the purchase of road freight services in competition with the railways is dismissed in a six-line paragraph which says little that is not already known. And the Nelson and West Coast mergers are covered by a quotation from the report of the No. 3 Transport Licensing Authority, who seems to have instigated the mergers and laid down the conditions governing them. But the department's report does not indicate, what it is most important to know, whether these mergers are part of a national scheme or whether the No. 3 Transport Licensing Authority has been acting on his own initiative. It must be hoped that before the session ends members of the Opposition will compel the Minister for Transport to give a franker and more revealing account of his department's activities,, particularly as those activities are restrained' by few of the normal democratic safeguards.