GOODS TRANSPORT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22724, 10 May 1937, Page 12

GOODS TRANSPORT

CONTROL BY STATE RUTHLESS CONFISCATION NATIONAL PARTY CRITICISM "The Minister of Transport, the Hon. T?. Semple, has made one of the most disturbing announcements yet made by any socialist Minister," says a statement issued by the executive of the New Zealand National Party. "Tho Minister has announced that tho whole of the long-distance goods transport system which operates beyond 30 miles on any railway route is to be forcibly taken over and socialised. Such ruthless confiscation cannot on any proper grounds be defended." The statement points out that large numbers of such businesses are being run by individuals and by private companies, hundreds of families subsisting on the profit of their enterprises. ]n many cases transport businesses have been fairly and properly conducted by generations of the same family. Before the Government came into power no one ever dreamed that such ruthless destruction of business would take place. Compensation Question The Government had promised to pay the owners compensation, adds the statement, but would it compensate the men who would necessarily bo thrown out of work? Even if it did, unless the amount was. so large that on investment it returned an income equivalent to wages, it would not be any real compensation. New avenues of employment would have to be sought by many who had spent all their lives in transport work and perhaps at a time when work would be hard to obtain.

Every day warnings were uttered from abroad as well as 111 New Zealand that the peak prices for wool could not bo maintained, and that when the national income fell, men and women, now living in a temporary phase of plenty, would be forced once more to endure unemployment created by the Government's gross folly. Over-capitalised Department

The enormous addition to the ranks of the civil service, which would result from the transport confiscation, simply added a further burden to the already heavily over-capitalised department. With transport a State monopoly all competition would go, and State transport would inevitably become less efficient, heavily over-staffed and ultimately largely indifferent to the demands and needs of business. 'lhe public was about ,to experience the effect of socialisation at a peculiarly sensitive point. The railways wore to be loaded with another £3,000,000 or £4.000,000 of capital if private transport businesses were to be compensated at a fair price, and the railways were already capitalised to the colossal sum of £54,500.000. Without competition freight rates would almost certainly soar. With the export and marketing of primary produce in the hands of civil servants, and with the transport system in the same condition, the farmer would soon be able to regard himself as nothing else but a servant of a State which undertook to pay him such a price for his butter, cheese and other produce as some high-placed well-paid civil servant deemed adequate.