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Otago Daily Times, Issue 23225, 24 June 1937, Page 10

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An inquiry which ' was opened at Invercargill yesterday into the circumstances surrounding the aeroplane disaster at Big Bay on the last day of the past year is being held in private. Neither in the Air Navigation Act, 1931, nor in the regulations issued under that Act, is there any provision justifying such a procedure. The Minister in Charge of Aviation, however, considers that it is not desirable that the inquiry should be open to the public or to the press. The ground on which this view is held by the Minister may be assumed to have been correctly stated by the Crown Solicitor, by whom the application for the exclusion of the public and the press was made to the Board. “It is impossible,” he said, “for the press to report the whole of the proceedings, and the view taken is that the public should get not extracts of the evidence but the findings of the Board,” which will in due course be published. This declaration casts an unjust reflection on the press and involves an injustice to the public. The community has, we think, sufficient confidence in the reliability of the reports of the proceedings at inquiries, such as inquiries in respect of marine disasters, corresponding to that now being held, to know that the material facts elicited at the investigation are invariably published. But, instead of being placed in possession of these material facts in this instance, the public is, because the Minister so desires, to be deprived of all information concerning the evidence given before the Board. And this, it is pretended, will be in the interests not only of aviation but also of the public. The decision of the Board, when notified, is, it is implied, all that the public is, in its own interests, entitled to know. The Board is, as its personnel shows, one that is fully competent to arrive at a just conclusion. But even a competent board is not necessarily infallible. The public will not yet have forgotten that two separate tribunals of unquestionable competence last year arrived at different conclusions with reference to a marine mishap on our own shores. Moreover, it is only by the publication of the evidence as the investigation proceeds that the public is enabled to secure the information, which it is really desirable it should acquire, respecting the subject of the inquiry. The decision of the Board, at the Minister’s instigation, to hold this inquiry in private is one, therefore, that seems to strike directly at the rights of the public.