The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. MONDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1922. THE RAILWAYS.

Southland Times, Issue 19653, 2 October 1922, Page 4

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. MONDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1922. THE RAILWAYS.

A special telegram printed in another part of to-day’s paper, reports the shrewd retort of a railway official to the complaints and criticisms so frequently made against his department. Commenting on the suggestion that a committee of business men should be appointed to advise and assist the general manager, he pointed out that the difficulty of making the railways pay was greater than it need have been, because the Department was required to operate lines which had cost too much and lines which could never pay, and it was business men and not the officers of the Department who were responsible for the construction of these lines. To call the average politician a business man is perhaps hardly fair to the business man, but it is none the less true that the Railway Department has no voice in the derision whether a proposed new line should be built or not, nor any control over the cost of construction. It is the politician who decides what new lines shall be built, and he is sufficiently a business man to make his decision with a due regard to its effect upon the voting at the next poll. Then the new line is built by a department which has no interest in its operation after completion. Thus nearly all our railways have cost too much to build and some should never have been built at all. and the Department is called upon to operate a system for which it was not responsible and which is overweighted with millions of unproductive capital. This officer’s remarks come as a sort of official footnote to the speech made by Sir Edwin Mitchelson last week, in which the lamentable results of “political pull” in railway policy were described and explained. But Sir Edwin’s story was not a new one, and a recital of the evils of political control of the railways will not end them. Governments are governments only so long as they remain in office. It is useless for a Government to have an heroic railway policy framed on strictly business lines if the effect of such a policy is the loss of the majority by which it holds office. Governments depend on the votes of politicians, and to keep their seats politicians must keep the votes of a majority of their constituents, so that both with the private member and the Cabinet Minister, it is votes that count. It would be absurd to pretend that one party is different from another in this respect. There is no question of corruption or deliberate jobbery; the pressure of circumstances is too strong to be resisted by the politician, be he Reformer, Liberal or Labourite. Whoever heard of an Otago member demanding that work should be stopped on the Otago Central railway? The LawrenceRoxburgh railway was started by a Liberal Government, but we do not recollect having heard Sir Janies Allen, when he was member for Bruce, protest that money expended on it was money thrown away. Furthermore, railways under Government control, railways which are State-owned, are quite properly used as means of promoting settlement, and with that end in view new lines are built in advance of requirements and pay indirectly from the outset, though the earnings at first may fall short of working expenses. On this ground almost any new line can be justified, and it is only the pressure of hard times that will stop the construction of what may be called “political railways.” This check has now been applied, but it is to the credit of the Government that, though a general election is very near at hand, it is dealing frankly and honestly with the electors. It is not making promises which it knows it cannot carry out, merely in order to catch votes. Mr. Coates has told several deputations in the plainest terms that he has no money for new lines, and in this, as in other matters, the Government has been strong enough to do its duty when it would have been pleasanter and more popular to do something else. We have no great hope that expenditure upon unnecessary lines will be stopped under any Government, and as Government work is always costly, the capital cost of our railways will always be excessive, but there is ample room for economy within the Department and for improvement in its internal methods. The staff is not responsible for the whole of the loss at present incurred in working the railways and the politicians must bear their share of the blame, but it is the higher officers of the Department who have to answer for part of the enormous increase in operating costs in recent years and for some of the idiosyncrasies of management that have irritated the public, who are the users as well as the owners of the railways.