SECOND-HAND GOODS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19701, 5 August 1938, Page 14

SECOND-HAND GOODS

STATUS OF BOTTLES RULING /OR DEALERS TEST CASE DECISION (Pur Press Association.) WELLINGTON, this day. A decision that bottles were secondhand articles within the meaning of the Second-hand Dealers' Act was given in a reserved judgment by the magistrate, Mr. A. M. Goulding. The case, which was in the nature of a test case, was one in which the defendant was the holder of a license under the Act and dealt largely in the purchase of bottles. In order that the matter might be tested before the court, steps were taken by the police to sell the defendant some empty bottles. This was done on June 8 and 10, when two constables sold 15 bottles of'various kinds to the defendant. The magistrate found as a fact that the particulars of neither transaction were entered in the defendant's books as required by section 8 of sub-section 1 and 2 of the. Act. Other transactions concerning bottles on those and other days had been entered. The magistrate considered that if bottles were second-hand articles within the meaning of the Act, an offence had been committed. At the hearing certain bottles were produced, and it was admitted by the police that it was impossible to say whether or not they ' were new bottles, the bottles that had been sold to the defendant or other bottles that had been used. Both sides' accepted the fact that certain firms daily handled hundreds of dozens of bottles and that it w.ould be vei'y difficult to carry out the provisions of the Act if they were strictly enforced, in' that it would be necessary to identify each bottle by numbering it as well as recording an entry of the transaction. It was argued that bottles and dealing in them was outside the Act and that they never had been the subject of such a prosecution. The defence relied on several New Zealand Supreme Court judgments. The magistrate, in the course of his judgment, said he was driven, to the conclusion that the bottles supplied to the defendant in this case were second-hand bottles. To all intents and purposes! they were old bottles in the sense that they were not.purchased from an original source, and put into use for the first time.

"It may be said that in one sense a bottle, unless it is cracked or broken, never becomes useless from wear," said the magistrate. "It can be cleaned and made to look like a new bottle. It then bears no distinguishing marks of wear, but once it has passed into cireufation and passes from hand to hand, it is an old and used bottle—a second-hand bottle.