THE EXPANSION LEAGUE.

Evening Star, Issue 21515, 13 September 1933, Page 8

THE EXPANSION LEAGUE.

Too many local bodies, too many members of Parliament, too much complexity in every way for our size have been complaints against our political and administrative system. It is not a condition that conduces to broad views of requirements. The Otago Expansion League aqd other leagues of its kind throughout New Zealand are an antidote to that weakness. They help bodies, and also politicians, whose views might otherwise be restricted to very narrow confines, to look beyond their particular boundaries and work for needs that are common to much wider areas. Occasionally the leagues have .done more; in their conferences with one another they have been able to review objects which have all a strong local advantage, and select those which they should unite in supporting for the sake of the most general benefit. For some years now they have had to labour under very special disadvantages. The Otago League has made small complaint about those. Its funds were precarious at the best of times; in a greater measure than usual it must have lived by faith since the depression began. Expansion is its object; for a long time past the very word has been like a knell, in conditions that have made contraction a necessity on all sides. Set the league has not lost heart. It continues to press for objects which can be shown to bo for the advancement of Otago, in the conviction that some day, the sooner for pressing and for that reiteration which wears away a stone, they will be realised, as many of its objects have been. They are urged for many years, till some people have grown tired of hearing them, but the arguments for are conclusive when the favourable moment comes. Even in the disheartening year that has passed the league has been rejoiced by the certainty that work will begin at last on a new Post Office; that “hardy annual ” will be missed from its future reports. The conference that it held last night, however, according to its custom, with local members of Parliament and representatives of other bodies, did not show any lack of causes to be gone on with, only a minority of which could be regarded as new. The Haast Pass road was perhaps the oldest, and the construction of that work, for the Jinking up of isolated communities in South Westland 4 and Otago and the providing of a round tourist route for the South Island, should be sensibly hastened by the league’s campaign. In pressing on the Government one of its latest items, the erection of a new maternity hospital for Dunedin, it is assured of strong allies, that work being recognised as a dominion need. Women’s bodies throughout New Zealand have been united in pressing for this amenity, in fulfilment of the promise given by the Government some years ago, and, in the long view, as plans for the building have been revised, the saving of official funds by its provision would offset the cost of it. We are glad to see that the league is concerned about the question of town planning, which has been too much in the background for a long time past. The case for its other objects has been well established, and Otago members who work for them will be aided when they do so as one body.