ROAD GOODS SERVICES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 260, 30 July 1937, Page 12

ROAD GOODS SERVICES

Government Plan Held To Involve Injustice “AVhether the goods motor services are kept in operation by the Government or whether they are closed down, there is no doubt that transport users will suffer inconvenience and hardship,” states a report supplied by the New Zealand Road Transport Alliance Incorporated. “This, however, will be no more serious than the injustice of the Government’s proposals to the firms who have pioneered and built up the goods motor transport industry into the public utility service that it is today.” continues the report. “This boon to the commerce of the country has not been effected without a lengthy period of experimentation and risk, and the present operators of the industry are the pioneers of the service which has just emerged from the experimental stage. "It lias not been till the last year or two that the proprietors of goods motor services could confidently look forward to a reasonable return for tbeir long and expensive pioneering efforts and it seems both unreasonable and unjust that they should now be expropriated. “These operators have given the best year s of their business life to building up the goods motor transport industry into the nationally useful service that it is admitted, even by the Government, to be to-day. Everything they possess is tied up in the business, and they hav e naturally cut themselves and their capital oft’ from other avenues of activity.

“If they are deprived of the opportunity to continue to operate motor goods transport, then they are deprived of a reasonable opportunity to earn a living in the business to which they have become specialised; and much of their capital, irretrievably sunk in development and establishment work, will be totally destroyed. Deprived of the right to employ their spee'al skill and their invested capital, they are apparently expected to be able to make a fresh start late in life, with their past experience and much of tbeir capital destroyed.

“It is not in the public interest that a legit’mate industry should be destroyed, and the living of a large number of people wiped out. in pursuit of a mere academic predeliction for universal socialisation. Business men generally should take warning that if they suffer this injustice to happen without protest, the turn of others will surely come, and private industry and commerce will be destroyed piecemeal by Socialism in New Zealand. The Minister of Transport has recently proclaimed in Australia that be remains an out-and-out Socialist, and in this matter lie and his Government are running true to form.”