THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1903. THE DOMAIN BILL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12409, 23 October 1903, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1903. THE DOMAIN BILL.

It is eminently satisfactory to know that when the Domain Hill question has been finally disposed of those who are now endeavouring to deprive their fellow citizens of one of the best: parts of a public park will be heartily ashamed of themselves. For the mental obsession which has taken hold of the minds of our Mayor and. Council—to justify the unjustifiable by giving legal effect to their most reprehensible proposition, which, we believe, not. one of them would have originally committed himself to had he given it adequate preliminary consideration—is carrying them info the most undisguised disregard of the rights of the City of Auckland. Facilis est descensus Averni is an old saying, and an ever true one. From the refusal of the

Mayer to call a public meeting of the citizens 01 Auckland to consider a question in "which they are so deeply interested td the present attempt of.His Worship and the Council to deprive the said citizens oi power in the event- of a poll on the question being required by Parliament- is an easy step indeed. So that while the citizens of Auckland are only gradually realising the wrongfulness of the proposal, to the Council and its official head it is evidently only another move in the determination to have their way with the Domain Hill, no matter how our citizens may protest, no matter how our citizens may vote. It is a striking lesson of the danger of entering upon a'mistaken and indefensible | course, ; it may also be a- fitting re- • turn for the misplaced trust and conI fidence which prevented the carryI ing of the Domain question into the recent- municipal elections. Yet it may fairly be claimed that even after they had been making common cause with the would-be despoilers of our city park, it was not to be supposed that our .civic authorities would have led the way, as they are doing, in rendering null and void the unquestionable and foregone decision at a- noil of the citizens whom they are supposed to represent. Such [ an attitude towards their too-trusting constituents, we venture to say, has never before been taken up by any I local authority in this colony. It is ' a complete confession, by Mayor and Council, that the City of Auckland itself would promptly consign to oblivion the scheme for its spoliation to which they have committed themselves. ■ Our city fathers are not too famous for their energy when municipal needs are to the fore, but they are showing us that they possess it when the city makes a stand against the maladministration nf its Tlnrorun

The Mayor and Council hope to ! ; defeat the determination of this city to allow no tampering with its publie park, by getting the proposed J poll extended to the entire hospital ! district. • The purpose of this ' strategy is obvious. They are well j aware, as everybody else is well aware, that to take a poll in this city would bo to strip completely away the pretensions of the Domain assailant. 1 ;. Any forecast would be confined to the calculating of the probable "majority against.'"' Ten to one against would be an ordinary estimate, that representative gathering of the working classes, the Auckland Trades and Labour Council, with its vote of 50 to 2 against, having given us a very fair idea of what those to whom the parks mean most think of the question. So, knowing that an Auckland poll would be decisively against them, they propose to call in the country to crush the town, to bring in the outlying suburbs and the dairying and fruitgrowing districtswhere men and women do not know what a park may be worth — help them, to tear from crowded Auckland its breezy Domain Hill. For they know, as we all know, that the whole indefensible proposal is designed to save the local bodies' pocket, and so they hope, by an appeal to the pocket of people whom this wrong will not injure, to bear down the legitimate opposition of the citizens. And yet we hear, and shall hear ad nauseam, that oar Mayor's proposal is just and right and fair and honest—all the virtuous qualities—and that the opposition to this flagrant wrong—thinly disguised as the exchange of a breezy hill for a swampy Hat —is a sad exhibition of human perversity.

The civic authorities, straining every thread of argument, tell us that everybody in the hospital district is equally interested with the people of Auckland City in the Auckland Domain. In the same sense this is equally so of everybody in the colony, so that the best thing to do is for Parliament to peremptorily throw out the Bill and thus in- j form the local bodies that it will allow no infringement, for any purpose whatever, of a public park. The hospital question is being wilfully confused with the park question. Every voter in the whole district might be fairly, though stupidly, consulted as to whether he favoured the erection of an infectious diseases hospital in the Domain supposing the Domain site were under offer to.the local bodies. He would not be consulted by a poll for the simple reason that the matter would not be of sufficient importance. But only the people to whose local authority a public reserve has been entrusted are entitled to be consulted in connection with it when the local authority, professing to speak for them, has its credentials doubted. The Domain is a public park vested in the municipality of Auckland for the general as well as the local good, because the municipality was naturally imagined to represent the people by whom the park would be most frequently used and who could be relied upon to preserve it. It would have been impossible to despoil the Domain as is proposed had the city government been loyal and true to its citizens. The sole purpose of a poll should 1 therefore be to test whether the ! Mayor and Council of Auckland | speak for the citizens as a body. To defeat such a poll is now *he policy of those who are trying to tamper with our Domain and who appear to find in our city authorities willing confederates.