LOCAL BODY REFORM

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23085, 9 July 1938, Page 14

LOCAL BODY REFORM

Though the Minister of Internal Affairs said yesterday there was no need to worry about the fate of his Local Government (Amalgamation Schemes) Bill, quite obviously it has no chance of being dealt with during this Parliament. What its prospects will be in the next depends on many things. Mr. Parry seems to have found, as others have before his day, that it is easier to state a good case for reducing New Zealand's badly overgrown system of local government than to have the case accepted. He himself described , the situation exactly, if a trifle naively, when he said that in his journeyings through the country he did not find one local body which did not believe in the need for reform, but not one was itself prepared to allow its own interests to be affected. There is the position : many convinced supporters of the principle of reform, but none convinced to the point of selfsacrifice. Mr. Parry says also that real progress toward his objective has been made, but unless it includes some means of circumventing or surmounting the obstacle he has himself described, it must be small, even if real, progress. There is no use anyone closing his eyes to what really bars the way—the vested interests of existing local bodies. Their lip service to the cause of reform does not prevent them from resisting to the last any measure of it threatening their own existence. They are vocal, almost vociferous, and to some extent organised. The people, who pay the rates and carry the swollen overhead cost of local government, are neither. Consequently the determined minority bars the way of measures which might bring relief to the passive majority, and might also result in local affairs being more efficiently managed. Some day the task of reform may be attacked with enough determination to defeat the opposition, but neither this year nor this Parliament will see that day dawn.