ROAD TRANSPORT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3934, 2 August 1937, Page 4

ROAD TRANSPORT

WHAT IS GOVERNMENT'S POLICY? PUBLIC INCONVENIENCE CERTAIN. Whether tlie goods motor services, if expropriated by the Government, are kept in operation, subsidiary to railway requirements, or whether they are closed down to the extent of ninety per cent as competitive witli the railways, and on this point the Government has made contradictory statements and appears to be facing both ways, there is no doubt that, users of transport wilt suffer inconvenience and hardship. This, however, will be no more serious than the injustice of the Government’s proposals in their incidence on the firms who have pioneered and built up the goods motor transport industry into the great public utility service it is today, says the N.Z. Road Transport Alliance (incorporated), in a message to hand this morning from Wellington. Goods motor transport is one of the great new industries that have grown up in the present age as the result of revolutionary mechanical invention. Motor transport tends everywhere to supplant the fixed track vehicle, and has revolutionised the business of goods carriage in all conditions where flexibility, mobility and adaptability are of decisive importance. It has quickened tlie flow of business, and stimulated industry and commerce wherever it has been introduced. PIONEERS OF THE INDUSTRY. This boon to tlie commerce of the country, however, has not been effected without a lengthy prior period of experimentation and risk, and without great cost incidental to the pioneering and establishment of the business. Tlie present operators of goods motor services in the Dominion are the pioneers of the industry, which has only recently emerged from the experimental stage. It is in fact a post-war development, here and in other parts of the world. In its first few years, from about 1921 onwards, it required incessant labour and much capital investment, and showed but little profit. Then, when internal difficulties appeared to have been surmounted, and assured returns in sight, the country encountered the prolonged depression about 1931, and seriously affected the transport industry along with almost all other forms of business activity. It has not been until tlie last year or two that the operators of motor goods transport could confidently look for a reasonable return to their long and expensive pioneering efforts. It seems both unreasonable and unjust that, having their own unaided efforts built up an industry which by common consent is economic in service and useful to tlie business community, they should now be expropriated just at tlie time when a fair return to their past efforts appears to be in sight. NATIONALLY USEFUL SERVICE. These operators have given the best years of their business lite to building up the goods motor transport industry into the nationally useful service that it is admitted even by the Government to be to-day. Everything they possess is tied up in the business, and they have naturally cut themselves and their capital oft from ether avenues of activity. 1 f they are deprived of. tlie opport unity to continue to operate motor goods transport, then they are deprived of a reasonable opportunity to earn a living in tlie business to which they have become specialised; and much of their capital, irretrievably sunk in development and establishment work, will be totally destroyed. Deprived of the right to employ their special skill and their invested capital, they are apparently expected to be able to make a fresh start late in life, with their past experience and much of their capital destroyed. DESTROYING LEGITIMATE INDUSTRY. It is not in the public interest that a legitimate industry should be destroyed, and the living of a large number of people wiped out, in pursuit of a mere academic predeliction for universal socialisation. Business men generally should take warning that if they suffer this injustice to happen without, protest, the turn oi others will surely come, and private industry and commerce will be destroyed piecemeal by socialism in New Zealand. The Minister of Transport lias recently proclaimed in Australia that he remains an out-and-out Socialist, and in this matter he and his Government are running true to form.