The Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY. MAY 30, 1906. MORE STATE COMPETITION.

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XII, Issue 2371, 30 May 1906, Page 4

The Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY. MAY 30, 1906. MORE STATE COMPETITION.

The report from Sydney that Mr Seddon is taking steps to introduce State competition with our colonial shipping companies, in order to enforce cheap excursion rates between Australia and New Zealand during the Christchurch exhibition, will hardly, says tlie "New Zealand Herald,’’ be received with enthusiasm throughout the colony. Is it not lair to ask that any energy the Government may have above and beyond the vast extransit problems, any money it may have above and beyond the vest expense of administration, shall ho applied to the development of internal transit and transport facilities? Yet we are to have a State excursion line between Sydney and Lyttelton, before we have a railway between Auckland and Gisborne, before the Northern Peninsula is opened up, before a sod is turned on a line to Kawhia. Our settlers may wait wearily for docent roads and hopelessly for railways. The dairy industry may be retarded. The fruit industry may languish. Mining may ho cruelly handicapped. Every phase of the industrial development of the back country may he paralysed by the difficulty of reaching the market. All t his dot ■s not excite Mr Seddon's interest nearly as much as does the cruel wrong which he imagines to be indicted upon the Australian pleasure tripper who may have to pay ordinary rates for getting to the exhibition at Christchurch. We conless to tho belief that in this case it would lie \Wll for Mr Rod (Toil to attend strictly to his recognised business, to distress himself as much as he can about the lamentable condition of our internal transit and, transput t service, already national-i ised, and to leave tho Australian pleasured rip. per in the hands of the shipping companies. They will probably oirrv him as cheaply ns it is profit a I 1 - for them to carry him, and in any case they cannot use him worse at s.ji than the Government uses our own colonists in their own land.