A NEW PROPOSAL

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 146, 22 June 1934, Page 10

A NEW PROPOSAL

TO. MARK CENTENARY

A NATIONAL BUILDING \

BEST USE FOR MONEY

'' The Mayor is calling a meeting next week to discuss plans for the proper celebration of the New Zealand centenary year," said a city business man to a "Post" reporter today. "May a suggestion be made by. one who will not be at that meeting: that consideration should be given to the possibility of marking the cpntenary in a permanent way, as, by the commencement of a far-overdue national building to replace the old wooden Government Buildings, or the completion of the half-finished Parliamentary Buildings? There is scarcely a point in favour of an exhibition anywhere in New Zealand five years from now apart from the argument that it would provide /a good deal of employment, and precisely the same holds of any big. building undertaking. "But on one hand-acres of ground would be covered with girnerack temporary structures and on the other a building would go up to serve a permanent purpose." i GRANT FROM THE NATIONAL PURSE. " It was very doubtful whether Wellington, with the assistance of visitors from other parts of New Zealand and from Australia and overseas, could make a financial success of an exhibition, and certainly it could not hope to do so without a very large grant from the Government. To his mind the Government grant (which certainly could not be less than the £ 50,000 granted to the Dunedin Exhibition) would be much better devoted towards the cost of a real need than towards the cost of the "buildings and exhibits that people occasionally look at between evenings in chocolate alley." WHAT IS AN EXHIBITION? ' "Chocolate Alley and its byways made the Dunedin Exhibition,'' he continued. "For every person interested in the exhibits there were ten crowded in Chocolate Alley trying for chocolates and odds and ends that they did not want in any case, and if that is to be the big thing in a AVellington exhibition, why not set up Choeolatc Alley anywhere and spend the other hundred thousand or a great deal nlore somewhere where it will give a return long after the centenary year is past?" He did not suggest that tho sum which would be spent in opening a worth-whilfl exhibition would build a modern block adequate for the require-' ments of Government departments, but looked at in cold fact, any grant made by the .Government for the erection of temporary, buildings would be lost to the Government unless the exhibition could attract a great many overseas visitors and induce them to spend money freely in New Zealand, since to attract Auckland people and their money to Wellington did not benefit JS ew Zealand as a whole in the least. HOUSING OP DEPARTMENTS. The Parliamentary Buildings, in their uncompleted stage, were not in the least monumental, he continued, and. there was good ground for believing that Parliament would give consideration to their completion during the next few years,-/but nothing had been said recently of proposals made some years ago for the replacing of the wooden Government Buildings with a modern block in which could be housed departments at present in -the buildings and departments _and offshoots scattered all over the city in all sorts of unexpected places. "Some of the departmental quarters are a positive disgrace to the Government and to Wellington," he said. "When, during the war, the Government threw tho 'tomato house' together, between the main building and the Supreme Court block, and the Records' Office shack, at the rear of the main building, shamefaced excuses were mado and assurances given' that they were necessitated by temporary requirements only. They are still there, offences to the eye and flagrant breaches of tho city bylaws, and still another annexe has since been crowded in between tho old Records bui]din£t arid"the main building. A fire in this, block would make an end of records on which tho working of the whole Dominion depends." -..•..,.. .„...■,

The meeting next week cannot,-of course, do more than pass suggestion's on to tho Government, for upon tho Government's attitude depended; tho final'decision to hold an'exhibition or to hold large-scale celebrations in some other form in 19^0, and, he suggested, the Mayor's mooting might "consider the building proposal worth some consideration for reference to the Government.