THE NAPIER HOTEL FINANCE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 258, 1 November 1932, Page 6

THE NAPIER HOTEL FINANCE.

|E MR. BARNARD, the Member of Parliament, for Napier, is correctly informed then the whole of the finances of the Masonic Hotel at Napier is to be built out of Government monies. The first mortgage of £21,000, is secured to the State Advances Department as trustee for the Hawke’s Bay Rehabilitation Committee; the second mortgage of £15,000 is secured to the Public. Trustee and the third mortgage of £B,OOO is provided by the Unemployment Fund. When the Chronicle commented upon this subject, on a previous occasion is assumed, as it had a right to do, that the Government or public funds were only committed to the extent of £B,OOO on third mortgage. It can be said that as Mr. Adam Hamilton was Acting-Minister for Unemployment that he was only concerned with the amount loaned by the Unemployment Fund. But is this tenable. The query was upon the loan as a third mortgage. The non-disclosure as to whom was given the first mortgage, and whom the second mortgage, was a matter of moment. Yet the public evidently had to await until the matter was the subject of debate in Parliament before it. learned the full facts. Why cannot Ministers be candid? Why this telling only half of the tale? With the whole of the facts made public the matter becomes one for increasing wonder. Here at a time when money is so scarce, when production is likely to languish for want of capital, £44,000 of public money has been placed at the hazard of a business whieh at the present moment cannot pay its way. This hazard has been undertaken for the sake of getting other money spent in the vicinity of the hotel. Hotel-keeping as a business is not a profitable one at the present time. Everybody knows that. The drinking habits of the people are changing, not in the Dominion only, but all the world over. A hotel is a hazard to-day ;it is not an investment. Under these eireiimstnnces, therefore, it would be as well for the whole of the proposition to be laid bare before the. public. It is the half revelations whieh breed suspicions, and at the present time suspicions arc springing up like quick-growing fungus within the body politic.