A POLICY OF FRUSTRATION

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 674, 28 May 1929, Page 8

A POLICY OF FRUSTRATION

MR. F. S. MORTON moves in devious ways his wonders to perform. Engaged at the moment in a sei-ies of elaborate manoeuvres to force an outer suburban by-election to fill the seat he is vacating on the Transport Board, he has secured an endorsement of his policy from a meeting of the local bodies he represents. The position is that Mr. Morton intends to resign from the board in any case. By resigning before May 31 he would allow his local bodies an opportunity to replace him ■without a by-election. But by waiting until after May 31 (with the authority granted last evening) he hopes to force a by-election with its attendant expense, and, in some mysterious fashion of his own, imagines that this strategy will persuade the Government to alter the present basis of the Transport Board membership, making it elective at once, instead of in 1931. The incorporation of the provision delaying introduction of the elective basis until 1931 was undertaken by Parliament at the specific suggestion of the Royal Commission on Auckland transport. The commission saw that local feeling was so excited on the question that sound judgments would for the present be obscured by preconceived prejudices. Hence came the recommendation to withhold the franchise until 1931. Unfortunately, the Transport Act in which this proposal was embodied is an involved and complicated document. Mr. Morton and his friends are doing their best to shoot holes in it, but if Mr. Morton imagines this is going to influence the Government to alter the principles of last year’s Act, he is pursuing another fallacy, rather like the one he pursued to no purpose at the Transport Board’s meeting the other day, when his wild talk about a secret meeting had to be incontinently withdrawn.

Mr. Morton claims to be conducting a campaign on behalf of suburban districts, but it has yet to be shown that the board has been in any way hostile to the suburbs, or that there is any mandate for Mr. Morton to continue his crusade. Strangely enough, Mr. Morton was a bitter opponent of the transport Joan, which was specifically designed to give better transport service to several suburbs. Strange, too, is the fact that Mr. Morton’s own district, Onehunga, supported by a four to one majority the loan to which its representative was so hostile. The City Council, as well as outer local bodies, is greatly concerned just now with the question of transport representation, and Air. Murray is also endeavouring to defeat the aims of Parliament. He is about as likely to succeed as the Onehunga and kindred districts are to gain any real benefit from the strategy of Mr. Morton. The limitation of the time allowed for reappointments was certainly not intended to -facilitate the policy of frustration now being employed by these gentlemen.