THE H.B. TRIBUNE THURSDAY. AUGUST 9, 1928 £6,000—FOR WHAT?

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 202, 9 August 1928, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE THURSDAY. AUGUST 9, 1928 £6,000—FOR WHAT?

SPECIAL MESSAGE from our parliamentary correspondent unfortunately got into a rather obscure corner of our yesterday’s issue and may therefore have missed the eyes of some of our readers. It is, however, worth some particular notice. It told us that there had been placed upon the supplementary estimates a further sum to meet the expenses incurred by the Marine Department in connection with the Royal Commission of Investigation which sat for so many weary weeks to enquire into the affairs of the Napier Harbour Board. This supplementary vote, we are further told, brings the total cost to the Department up to no less a sum than £4035. To this have to be added the costs incurred by the Board, which we have good reason to believe fell not very far short of another £2000,. Thus there has been spent out of taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ money a total of somewhere about £6ooo—and for what? To be told by three total strangers to the district, wholly unacquainted with its potential productive capacity, that it was not to think for the next ten or fifteen years of instituting a harbour and port, worthy of the name, to assist in its development. This, too, is while Wanganui and Taranaki are being afforded every facility to proceed with the prosecution of their harbour schemes, neither of them to be compared with that which was in contemplation for Hawke’s Bay. The £4OOO, which the taxpayers of the country are called upon to pay for the Marine Department, was lavishly spent solely for the purpose of justifying a hurried report made to the Minister in charge by' his Chief Engineer after only some three or four days of investigation and observation. It is to be noted, too, that in accord with the Commission’s recommendations as originally drafted, every effort was made to saddle the Board with this most extravagant expenditure. But, so we are informed from an authentic Source, though the Commission was headed t>y a gentleman rs puted to be learned in the law, it was left for a lay'man to point out that the Commission had exceeded its authority in making this recommendation as to costs. It was only through this intervention that the Harbour Hoard escaped the heavy fine which the Commission sought to impose upon it for having dared to think of providing us with an adequate harbour and port thgj, have

a chance of competing with Wellington, greei’v to grab the ocean transport trade of all the southern half of the North Island, And now we have those who are allowed to shape the destinies of what should be a chief city in which we might all take some pride seemingly content, without a murmur or a protest, to let things rtm along as they have done for the last half-century while our rights are being filched from us. never to be recovered. Selfgagged by a blindly premature pledge to accept the Commission’s findings in their entirety, they sit mute under a most grossly contemptuous edict. No doubt. b<""“ver, not a few of them are well satisfied to think that they have «lt least preserved their own petty interests, even at the sacrifice of the very much greater ones of the rest of the district.