A POLITICAL ANTI-CLIMAX

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 814, 7 November 1929, Page 8

A POLITICAL ANTI-CLIMAX

SHORN of every contentious provision which its comprehensive text originally embraced, the Transport Bill is now a document chiefly remarkable for its negative character. The Hon. W. A. Veitch may well bemoan the fate that the exigencies of the session have brought upon the measure with which he had planned to bring about a transport millenium. All that is now left to him, after what Mr. C. H. Clinkard was pleased to report as “trifling” amendments, are the bare existence of the transport department and his own tenure of a somewhat emasculated responsibility at its head. The Transport Advisory Council has gone, after a nominal life of only six brief months, and with it go the elaborate plans for alteration of the whole of the motor-bus licensing system. It is not suggested that the existing system is entirely satisfactory, but the new boundaries proposed in the Bill, embracing as they did territories without any common geographical interest, would not have been an improvement. The Bill was regarded suspiciously because it bore all the marks of hasty preparation and insufficient study. The Transport Council was only set up last April, and the Bill came forward in September. Thus in five months a body only meeting at intervals had formulated proposals for a sweeping alteration of the existing order. The thing looked altogether too much like a repetition of the old principle of trial and error which has governed transport legislation in this country ever since motor-cars were put on the roads. There was no demand at all for some of the proposed changes. Other provisions, dealing with matters like inspection of driving licences, institution of prosecutions within a set period, and abolition of payment to traffic policemen according to the convictions they secure, covered ground already traversed by just and reasonable local bodies. With the Bill reduced to a skeleton, the Transport Ministry set up with such fanfare last January becomes more than ever a mockery, and it will remain so until it is given some of the practical power at present held by the Post Office and the Public Works Department. The system of controlling motorists might thereby be simplified, but even so it will not be at all easy to justify the establishment of a new Ministry, with all that the process involves. Except that the observations of some of its members may have been enlightening contributions to the theme, the work of that short-lived body, the Transport Advisory Council, has gone practically for nothing, and Cabinet will have to east about for some other method of recognising the worth of Mr. I\. Masters, who reigned briefly as its chairman.