PULLING TOGETHER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20672, 10 March 1937, Page 10

PULLING TOGETHER

MINISTER REPLIES TO CRITICISM EMPHATIC DENIAL “I have been twitted a good deal lately that the Minister of Public Works and myself are working in opposite directions in our local government policies. I have been told that mj’ colleague’s public utterances of his intentions for reading policy and river control are simply aiming at centralisation. I have been told that we (the Government) are going to take the backbone out of local government and that as soon as the backbone has gone the whole body of local government must collapse. And then, I have been asked what is the use of all the trouble in reorganising local government if the structure is doomed to collapse. Let me give this an emphatic denial.” These remarks were made by the Minister of Internal Affairs (the Hon. W. E. Parry), when speaking at the opening of the Municipal Conference in Timaru last night. Continuing, Mr Parry said: “We are not going to take the backbone out of local government nor are we going to allow it to collapse. What we want to do is to put more backbone into the structure so that it cannot collapse. My colleague and I, in our respective

spheres are working in exactly the same direction in this matter. We have been quite agreed on this all along. Before leaving Wellington I went to the trouble of specially discussing this very point with him so that I could tell you, and, through him, the country, what the position really is.” The Minister went on ot say that it had been said that the Government was going to take over the control of all the reads. It was not. What the Minister of Public Works intended was to bring up to date that part of the reading system which had long been recognised as a national problem, the main highways. He was not doing anything revolutionary there. It was now established that the problem of the main highways was not a problem for, say, South Canterbury in its area, or Wairarapa in its area, or for any other region, but for the Dominion. But those reading problems that were exclusively for the benefit of a particular area would be left to that area to pay for and control. On this phase of the subject, however, they wanted to see that there was no overlapping or loss of efficiency. They had found, for example, that the riding finance system in counties together with the existence of a number of small counties was such that plant and machinery were lying idle in some districts while other districts were unable to find enough money to purchase plant and machinery. The Minister of Public Works had actually found that some local bodies could not avail themselves of his subsidies because the ridings affected had not the money to meet their share; whilst at the same time other ridings in the same county had substantial credit balances. This was what they wanted to remedy. “Then as regards rivers,’ said Mr Parry, “I have been told that the Min-

ister of Public Works is going to take over the control of the rivers also. He has never said so. What he said is that there is a big problem involved in the proper and effective control c.' all our rivers and that this problem must be tackled more vigorously than has been the case. Both he and I have seen what has happened, and we are agreed upon that. We have seen in one case where four local bodies were controlling a portion of a river, each one trying to shift the water from its own locality. But none of them was attempting to, nor desirous of tackling the real problem of controlling the whole of the river. The net result, from the point of view of the whole community, was that practically every penny of expenditure has been wasted and the real job has yet to be started. Our rivers and watercourses and, accrdingly, the large tracts of land affected by them, have too frequently been neglected to the detriment of the life and production of this Dominion. This is what we want to stop.” Equipping Local Bodies

The Minister added: “The cure is not, however, to take control from local bodies. It is to equip the local bodies with such powers and areas of control that they have the necessary finance and the will to recognise that the problem is theirs to tackle, and to tackle it accordingly. And the Government will help. The Minister of Public Works has said that he will have a comprehensive report made on the river question showing what work has to be done; but unless it is forced-jpon us we are not going to take that work away from the local bodies. Of course,

we recognise there may be river problems that are beyond local control where the State must step in but our general policy will be in the direction of local government control, where practicable, and where the job is being done.”