SMALL HARBOURS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 12 September 1924, Page 5

SMALL HARBOURS.

MARINE SECRETARY’S CRITICISM

“PIECEMEAL POTTERING” OF RECENT YEARS

(By Telegraph.—Special to Star.) 7 WELLINGTON, Sept. 11. The Minister of Marine in considering plans for new harbours has gone beyond his former policy of deciding simply if they tended to injure navigation. His powers now include a decision 011 whether the proposals are justified as a self-supporting harbour proposition and that alternative transit facilities do not exist. “Harbours are essential,” remarks the Under-Secretary for Marine in his anual report, “but they cease to justify the essential category when constructed to provide for traffic which can be adequately provided for otherwise by publicly owned utilities, road or railway, and at a capital plus the operating cost which cannot be met bv charges on shipping and goods, but which requires the deficit to be made good by special taxation over the district. In what I have to say on the subject I exclude, of course, those harbours which I have termed essential. Apart from, these, vet to a certain extent including some of them, it is submitted that in- many cases costly and unsatisfactory harbours have been constructed in places where the population lias congregated rather than at places in the near vicinity where natural harbours existed ; and that a large amount of money has been expended creating harbours in competition with existing economical and suitable transport; in piecemeal pottering at essential harbour propositions which could be satisfactorily dealt with only as a comprehensive whole, or in providing accommodation for overseas vessels where the charges on vessels and goods cannot possible be made to cover the expenditure involved in making the provisions.” The report notes that there is a marked tendency to indulge in heavy expenditure on secondary or tertiary harbours for overseas vessels, but it is undoubted that the shipping companies charge higher freights to meet the cost of collecting cargo around, the coast.