RESTRICTING REGULATIONS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21347, 23 November 1932, Page 10

RESTRICTING REGULATIONS

Close on the heels of a Board of

Trade regulation empowering the Minister of Industries and Commerce to forbid the erection of new picture theatres where, in his opinion, their opening would result in uneconomic waste, comes another making it necessary for new dairy factories first to obtain a licence. Thus the Juggernaut of monopoly, crushing individual initiative and enterprise, rolls forward. The new dairy factory regulations, which obviously should have been submitted to Parliament, expand the bureaucratic powers of the .Department of Agriculture to an alarming degree. It is the Minister who will set up the committee to investigate a proposal to establish a new manufacturing dairy, but it is to the director of the Dairy Division that it will report. It- will advise upon the "economic necessity" for the establishment of the factory, consider the nature of the proposed premises and the probable effect of the new competition on the quality of the dairy produce in the new and other factories. Presumably the committee's decision will be final, but the whole procedure is designed to place arbitrary restraints upon private or co-opera-tive enterprise, which is the best safeguard against industrial inefficiency and the evils of monopoly. It is for the shareholders of a new factory to decide whether their venture means economic waste. Under the ordinary laws of business it is the risk of competition which keeps concerns up to the mark. An unofficial suggestion has been made that too high a degree of competition for milk supplies might result in the manufacture of impure milk, but grading and other regulations which are essential in the national _ interest ought to be quite adequate in penalising those who thus lower their standards. It is contrary to the principles upon which the National Government was elected that departments should be armed with such extravagant powers of interference with business as those of the new dairy and picture theatre orders. It is naively remarked by the director of the Dairy Division that the regulations are purely a precautionary measure, but they seem to fit a Wairarapa dairy factory scheme. The picture theatre restrictions, it might be recalled, promptly found particular application. In spite of public protest Parliament continues to allow its powers to be filched by the Order-in-Council method, which paves the way to bureaucratic despotism. Month by month the people's representatives become more tightly tied and gagged.