NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 269, 9 August 1943, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

As stated on Thursday by the Minister of Stabilization (Mr. Sullivan) that the Economic Stabilization Emergency Regulations, which became law in December last, provide that every landlord must keep a tenancy register. But if, as the Minister remarked, some landlords have overlooked this instruction, the fact is not surprising. A complex inass of orders, governing a very wide field of buying, selling and hiring were introduced at that time, as part of the general stabilization scheme. There has been abundant evidence that many people—professional and business men ns well as private citizens—have become thoroughly bewildered by the spate of Regulations during the past three years and more, as well as by the slap-dash methods adopted in framing many of them and putting them into force. When it is realized that, last year alone, no fewer than 348 Regulations—representing thousands of separate instructions to the public—were introduced, the average citizen’s difficulty in keeping in mind even a fraction of his obligations can well be appreciated. The obligation on landlords to compile a tenancy register, which must be produced for inspection by a tenant or “any authorized person,” may be regarded,as a minor imposition: but it is one more item on the long list, of undertakings and restraints to which the property owner must submit if he lets a dwelling to a follow citizen. It is of doubtful necessity, and stands as an added discouragement to home letting at a time of urgent need for this type of enterprise.

With the entry of the Eighth Army into Catania, it has now covered 2000 miles by land and sea since it advanced to the attack on Rommel’s forces at El Alamein. That must be a ILcord, and the only campaigns at all comparable with it in that part of the world surely were those of Hannibal and others before the Christian era. Some of the forces of the Crusaders assembled in Tunisia, but probably travelled eastward by sea. The trek of the Eighth Army lias by no means ended, and it may be that men who fought in Greece and latei were included in that unit will practically complete the encircling of the whole of the eastern portion of the Mediterranean. When it is recalled that tiie New Zealand Division was withdrawn from Syria in order to serve under General Montgomery's command their long and hind journey, virtually from the frontier of Turkey to the coast of Tunisia, was piobably also a record.