SHIPPING COMPANY MANAGEMENT.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 677, 30 November 1909, Page 9

SHIPPING COMPANY MANAGEMENT.

Sir,—Referring to the recent report in your . columns of the meeting cf the Now Zealand Shipping Company shareholders,' may. I. ask in a friendly spirit, Can the fact set out that five of their palatial steamers with full crows wcro laid up in New Zealand waters for a total cf 737 days during last year be justified or accepted as a satisfactory state- of things? Then, as also pointed out, can the collection of produce at any or all ports and roadsteads all round our coasts at'one rate of freight be held to to reasonable? Why should such ports as Lyttolton or Wellington, where a steaoier gets every dispatch, pay tho same freight as, say, the Bluff or any open roadstead, with all the attendant risks ana detention? Tho companies appear to do this to rcduce rivalry and 1 simplify the'lines of their combine, and also to bo thus able to dictate tho rates which tho settler is to be made to pay. However, as a settler, I hold with Sir George Clifford that as a body we are under an • obligation : to theso shipping companies; still, shipping, like every other enterprise, has to bo carried on upon business lines, lines which if followed would not leave it open for outsiders to cnt in, year after year, nntl to load nt rates of freight evidently profitable to all . concerned, and, if these companies' dividends are reduced, the question supgested by theso points of the. published report is, ,How could it be expected to be otherwise ?-I am. etc.,- . SETTLER., . November 26, .