THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1930. RAILWAYS AND TAXES.

Wairarapa Age, 26 August 1930, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1930. RAILWAYS AND TAXES.

Every now and then some trusting New Zealander on a visit to Sydney is victimised by “money-changers,” who leave him standing in fijmt of an imposing-looking building j while they enter by the front door and leave by the back door, taking their victim’s money with them. Probably not many New Zealanders are simple enough to be cozened in this way, but the general population of the Dominion will show itself to be greatly in need of guardianship of a protective kind if it allows the railway construction programme now before the coiintiy to proceed. According to the figures the United Government has produced, 345 miles of railway now projected—including the three South Island lines which the United Party affirmed at election time would be built without costing the taxpayer a penny—are expected when they are built and in working operation to show an annual loss’ of £737,000. TK> taxpayers, that is to say, are to pay three-quarters of a million sterling, year after year, merely for the pleasure of knowing that certain railways have been built and are not paying their way.

If the people of New Zealand submit to this financial outrage they will deserve all that happens to them. This is something much worse than robbery by confidence men. In a' calamity of that kind the immediate loss is the total loss, but where railway construction is concerned the people of thii country are being asked to acquiesce in a transaction that will result in their pockets being raided heavily year after year for all the time that most of them will know on this earth.

Moreover, the annual loss in prospect on the railways now proposed to be built or completed obviously will be far greater than the sum mentioned in the official estimate. For instance, the estimated loss on the South Island Mam Trunk Railway is £190,000 a year. But this estimate assumes that the 76 miles of line now projected—a railway running through a great deal of dead ground and one that will compete, if it is built, with a.popular and efficient earn a uet P roflt » f £35,160, or £462 a mile. The average net operating earning last year on the whole of the railways of the Dominion however, was only £l9l a mile. In the •North Island, this figure was £348. On the 1627 miles of the South Island ■system, it was only £79 a mile. The estimate that the 76 miles of the South Island Main Trunk railway will cost the taxpayers £loo,ooo’ a year is based on an assumption that the net operating earnings of the section per mile will be nearly six times as great as those of the existing South Island railways. Obviously, however, the projected section would never earn anything like this fanciful figure and the figure of estimated loss must be multiplied accordingly to get at the facts. No one political party is solely responsible for the tremendous incubus of railway construction that is being imposed on the Dominion and its people, and there are construction and completion projects in the North Island that only less urgently need to be reviewed than the lunatic proposal to complete the South Island Main Trunk and other dead-loss lines in the South Island. If the people of New Zealand are wise they will demand a comprehensive review of railway construction and deniand it in such terms as no Government will be able to ignore or resist.