The Press MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1947. Selwyn Scheme

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25307, 6 October 1947, Page 6

The Press MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1947. Selwyn Scheme

The North Canterbury Catchment Board, at its meeting on Friday, had more to hear than it heard two months ago about the delay of the Cabinet approval of the subsidy which it must have, before it can go on with the Selwyn flood control scheme. In August it had already been waiting for three months, its scheme complete and adopted by five contributory local bodies, plant and material and crews provided for, the scheme itself and the proposed £ 3 for £ 1 subsidy recommended by the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Council and supported by the Minister of Works, Yet, when the chairman of the board, Mr W. Machin, urged the Minister to speed decision, the telegraphed reply was that it would be “some time" before the Cabinet could consider the matter—because, as Mr Madhin had reason to suggest, the Cabinet and the .Treasury “ wished to draw up some uniform “ system of dealing with subsidies ”, On Friday he was able to tell the board that, though the Minister of Finance had meantime confidently expected to have the subsidy question settled before August was out, the Treasury had caused two departmental officers (who are also members of the board) to be instructed to prepare a report on the probable extent of the betterment of lands affected by the scheme. This of course confirms the belief that decision is being delayed while a systematic basis for the grant of differential subsidy rates is studied, though if is not clear whether the Cabinet is so bent on this study as the Treasury. But the procedure is as disturbingly odd as the results are unfortunate. In the first place, the boaiM has not been directly called on either by its parent body, the national council, or by the Minister of Works or by the Minister of Finance, to prepare the required information or to assist in preparing it; it has not even been advised, by any such proper. route, that two of its members, as departmental officials, have been instructed to prepare the report; it knows what it knows only because they advised the chairman of their instructions, asked for assistance in carrying them out—and, when requested in their turn to be quite open with the board as they prepared their report and to supply a copy of it, could only reply, in effect, that they would have to see what Wellington said to that. Quite apart from any question—and it is a serious question—of the conditions under which a Government official acts as a member of a public body, if he can be required to report confidentially to his superiors on what is as much the board’s business as theirs, it may be asked why the procedure defined in Section 129 of the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Act has not .been followed. The first sub-section says that, as and when the council directs, the board—the board, not selected official members of the . board—shall give full information upon any of its affairs either to the council or as the council instructs it otherwise. This necessary and correct procedure should not be set aside in any circumstances. Second, it is alarming to find that the’Treasury is preparing to waste time on the complexities of betterment in this field, which it can hardly open up without finding itself drawn much further. But even if it'succeeds in delimiting the field, the alternative dangers are that it will take a little time to form arbitrary conclusions, less likely to regularise a subsidy system than to distort it tinworkably, or a long time to decide that betterment, when all factors are fairly and fully considered, will not serve to reflate it. Let the investigation be made, however, by all means, provided that the catchment boards are called into it on proper terms; let them collaborate in all necessary inquiries to establish a, fair, working method of classifying catchment works for subsidy. But it is intolerable that any such in-> quiries, six years after the writing of the act into the Statute Book, should hold up the advance of approved and urgent works. Subsidies have been fixed and approved so far by ad hoc judgment—always on the recommendation of the Government’s accepted, expert advisers —and, till a better method can be evolved, should still be. The North Canterbury Catchment Board has a grievance now. It«will be monstrously aggravated if the Selwyn scheme is indefinitely delayed, and the flood risk protracted, while the Treasury pursues its new-found interest.