AN OUTSPOKEN CRITIC.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8192, 6 August 1912, Page 8

AN OUTSPOKEN CRITIC.

There is not the least reason why the recent amazing report of the New South Wales Totalisator Commission should delay the arrival of the machine (says “The bulletin"). Parliament knows, as well as the man in the street, the unsavory influences which were brought to bear on certain members of the absurd body that has just finished tearing about Australasia, to no purpose, at the taxpayers’ expense. It knows, also, that the minds of certain other members of the Commission were made up before any investigating whatever was done, and that no arguments or evidence would havo altered their views. I a brief, the Commission was a farce from the start, and it has finished its “turn” in an eminently fitting manner. It did the community one unavoidable service, and one only, inasmuch as it elicited a quantity of evidence in regard to the totalisator. Fully 90 per cent, of that evidence was powerfully in favor of the tote; the rest wae more or less against it. The members of the Commission hardly made a pretence at deciding the issue before them on the pvid»nce. But there is no justification for Parliament following their example. The obvious thing for the Government to do, in view of the various facts that ■■vere put before the Tote Commission in the course of its expensive wanderings, is to firmly discourage the Private Bill business, and bring in a measure of its own for the legalisation of the machine. Cn fortunately, however. Governments rarely do the obvious thing.