Wayside Advertising.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19148, 3 November 1927, Page 8

Wayside Advertising.

The South Island Motor Union might have gone a great deal further in its criticism of the Counties Amendment Act than to ask that the notice to be given to hoardings proprietors should be reduced from five years to three. There should not, in the first place," have been, any necessity to consider the hoardings question in such an absurd setting, since the Government should have had the good sense, and the courage, to deal with it boldly as an independent evil. The "law of "the land," as Mr P. W. Johnston said, and not the by-laws which local bodies might or might not make, should forbid hoardings that disfigure the landscape, and it should forbid them with some sharpness. Por.it is not a case of an evil that has come on. us suddenly, and of •■ evil-doers: who have had no time to reform. Anyone who' goes on' erecting hoardings in 1927, in New Zealand or anywhere else, knows that he is taking a risk, since they have been condemned in the most unmeasured terms by all kinds and conditions of people—even in those countries (the " United States, for example) in which rampant commercialism might have been supposed to have destroyed taste in all but a small percentage of the population. But if hoardings are to' be left in the hands of local bodies, the power of such bodies to prohibit them should not be a sham power, as it is when offenders must be given even three years' notice to cease creating a nuisance, but should be a real and effective authority, subject at most to a notice of twelve months. For those engaged in the hoardings business know that many things can happen in three years, 'and far more in five, to. make it very difficult to enforce a prohibition which is neither universal nor recent, and they will naturally do everything that they can do in the interval to divert attention from the real issue. They have in fact begun. There is in circulation now in Christchurch a folder which, though it will not influence anyone who thinks, contains extracts of speeches by.the Prince of Wales and the Lord Chief Justice of England, so arranged with an article of our own as to suggest to the simple-minded that our sole objection to hoardings is that they are rivals, to ourselves in business. If Ave had no more terrible rivals than those capable of such absurdities our worries would be few, but there are always some birds caught even when the net is spread in their sight, and it is not pleasant to think what the state of our countryside may be if there is no legal check on hoardings before 1932.