The Press Friday, September 25, 1931. South Island Main Trunk.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20351, 25 September 1931, Page 10

The Press Friday, September 25, 1931. South Island Main Trunk.

A Blenheim message to-day reports that members of Parliament are being invited to inspect the route and progress of the South Island Main Trunk railway; and though it is difficult to blame the citizens and settlers of Marlborough for taking a course so abundantly justified by precedent, its dangers ought to be clearly pointed out and understood. Because the State railways have gone far on the way to hopeless insolvency under political control, and because political control is largely to blame, they have been handed over to a non-political Board. After the recent inspection, when for the first time the facts as they are were reviewed in complete detachment from politics, the Board unhesitatingly decided against the line, and did so although it searched for, and was ready to be convinced by, evidence (hat the prospects of the line were sound. It was " compelled to conclude " that neither the immediate nor the "remoter prospect is sufficiently encouraging to justify the expenditure "that would be involved." If Parliament disregards the recommendation to stop work, it will take an exceedingly heavy responsibility, not only for adding loss to loss and waste to waste, out for re-introducing, defiantly and at the first opportunity, the very evil it is supposed to have banished. It will be telling the Board, whose business it t is to put the railways back on a basis of self-supporting efficiency, either that politicians understand better how this is to be done, or that politicians are going to make it impossible; and either way the Board's position becomes hopeless and untenable. As we have pointed out before, the Act is so drafted as to reserve to Parliament considerable power to over-ride the Board. It can still build lines in spite of the Board, or resume suspended lines in spite of the Board; and it can defy the recommendation to discontinue lines under construction, because nothing seemg to be said in the Act about them, and the omission was perhaps not careless. But the astonishing fact is that if Parliament does decide to go on with a line, completes it, and hands it over to the Board as a line open for traffic, the Board can immediately close it down and even sell the land, stations, rails, equipment, and so on, belonging to it. Section 20 reads as follows:

The Board on being satisfied that any railway • • » can continue to be operated only under conditions that will result in the net revenue therefrom being insufficient' to cover the working expenses thereof, or on being satisfied that sny railway • • • is otherwise not in the public interest, may cease to operate the same, and with the approval of the Governor-General in Council dispose of the land and all other property of the Crown in respect of such railway. ... ,

The Act is in fact a strange and dangerous mixture of cunning and stupidity and good sense; but Parliament wili be exceedingly culpable if it does not consider itself bound by the good sense, and bound to ignore the means of circumventing the Board.