TRIPLE TRAPEZE ARTISTRY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 125, 29 May 1930, Page 8

TRIPLE TRAPEZE ARTISTRY

If we correctly read Mr. D. R. Hoggard's figures, the Hutt County Council would need to levy on its capital value a rate of twopence in the £ ("which, of course, the ratepayers cannot afford") in order to spend'£loo per mile on the county's 272 miles of formed road. Of the total mileage, 72 miles is subsidised by the Main Highways Board, but yet costs the County Council,, over and above subsidy, £115 a mile, or £15 a mile more than this impossible twopenny rate (spread over the whole 272 miles) would be equal to. In other words, the Council is spending on subsidised highways, out of its own pocket, more money per mile than it can hope to spend on unsubsidised roads out of its own unaided pocket. .What is wanted, to complete the view, is an estimate of how much per mile is actually being spent on the unsubsidised roads, and how much.' that amount falls short of their economic need. Meanwhile, the counties as counties are evolving towards a plan of reform; and ithe farmers as farmers are evolving towards another. The Farmers' Union annual conference \will consider a motion (with English precedent) to exempt all farm lands (agricultural and pastoral) from road rates, and •to dump the transferred liability on to.increased petrol taxation. At the same time the County Councils are considering a Tauranga resolution which apparently aims to relieve all counties of contributions towards highways (estimated ■by the Hutt County Council at £115 a mile), the scapegbat again being petrol taxation. The two ideas are not on all fours, because county lands are not all farm lands. But either of them opens up a very pretty argument. Now that Mr. Veitch retires from Transport in order to look at roads, rails, and rates through a railways telescope;, and now that Mr. Taverner has left railways in order to co-ordinate Transport and Public Works; and now that it devolves on Mr. Ransom (Lands) to find reasons why the farmers should (or should not) contribute to the cost of those roads which he himself was building so busily until last week— now that this triple somersaulting on the political trapeze has been gracefully accomplished, perhaps the country will see a united and muchneeded effort to find a real transport policy. __■