CORRESPONDENCE

Southland Times, Issue 19898, 17 June 1926, Page 9

CORRESPONDENCE

Letters must be written in ink and on one •ide of the paper. Unless a signature, not necessarily for publication, accompanies a letter as a guarantee of good faith it will not be considered. An asterisk attached to the signature to a published letter denotes that some portion has been deleted by the Editor, a right which is exercised in questions of public policy, libel, good taste and fair play. PROPOSED KEW HOSPITAL. To the Editor. Sir, —In your leader of 12th inst. you draw the attention of the ratepayers to the proposed coming conference between the Director-General of Hospitals and the Southland Hospital Board on the tenders for the general hospital at Kew. Please pardon me as an interested ratepayer taking the liberty of making a few comments. You very rightly suggest that it would be a very excellent thing if the proposed conference was open to the public. Well, if the public is not allowed to have any say in it, then it cannot under any stretch of imagination be called a public institution. You also state that it cannot be said that the public is yet fully informed concerning the arguments for and against the proposal. I may say that they will be well informed when they get the special hospital rate notices, as a reward for their present desultory vacillation in not taking up their cudgels against the preposterous monstrosity. You also say that the plans proposed will furnish the district with a hospital second to none in the Dominion. But I maintain that the mortgage will be also second to none. Also you state that these plans have been drawn with great care; I quite agree with you there, as the board’s architect is recognised as one of the ablest artists in his profession in the whole Dominion, but he could, if requested by the board, make out plans of a hospital on the present site of the General Hospital that would be a credit to his artistic attainments, and a huge saving in rates, which after all is absolutely essential in a young and overmortgaged and over-taxed country. I must compliment the Southland division of the British Medical Association on the stand it has taken against the scheme. Also you suggest that their opinion will undoubtedly carry weight with the Department; quite so, providing the bungle is not gone on with without consulting the association or the public. The board has really been very neglectful of the public interests in not giving us more and fuller information on both sides of the question, before arranging for the final conference on the tenders. Such men are quite unworthy of the confidence of the vast majority of the ratepayers when they even think of squandering such a huge sum of public money in such an outlandish and out-of-the-way place as the proposed site. It is said that the Hospital Board is far from unanimous about it; but that is not enough. They should have come out in the open long ago and let the people know how they stand. It is proposed that the board’s proposals do not require any increase in the rates. That proposal is too thin, but it is good propaganda for a start. —I am, etc., T. J. GARVEY. Mabel. -