NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 124, 19 February 1919, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

A damper is thrown by the secretary of the Railway, Locomotive Engineers' Society on the claims of those who are urging the Bailways Department to restore suburban and Sunday railway services to pre-war conditions. Mb. M'Ahley's picture of the overworked locomotive men is one which cannot be treated lightly. . Accepting his _ information as correct, ,it is obvious that under existing conditions it would not only entail heavy hardship- on many railway servants to restore the old-time services, but might also endanger the travelling public. This, however, does not mean that no improvement is possible. It merely emphasises the necessity of securing the return from overseas as rapidly as possible of all classes of railway employees' so that the railways may bo staffed to the required strength. This we have .already been told is being attended to, and no doubt conditions will soon permit of an improvement in the more urgently required services. It is evident, however, that it will be some lime before a complete restoration of services can be looked, for.

The most effective weapon used by the Labour-Socialists here as elsewhere to gain popular sympathy for their cau,so is the cost of living. Everyone has felt tho pinch of high prices more or less, and in' consequence the inclination is to lend a ready ear to those who are loudest in their ' denunciations of the "profiteers." It is interesting to note, therefore, the investigations of the Conimonwealth Statistician into variations in prices of food and groceries in the Commonwealth. It would be expected from the attitude- and talk of the Labour-Socialists that wherever a Labour-Socialist Government happened to be in office prices would be so controlled that even under war conditions the cost of_ living would bo kept down to a minimum. But such, it seems, is not the case. In Australia, for instance, thoreisa very militant Labour-Socialist State Government in office in Queensland. It has been in office for some years, but, according to the Government Statistician, the cost of living has increased to a greater' extent in Queensland than in any other State in the Commonwealth. The figures given arc worth quoting and noting. They are as follow:

Increase .' since outbreak of war. Queensland 51.8 per cent. New South Wales 38.7 „ „ Tasmania 37.6 „ „ Victoria 33.9 „ „ South Australia 29.2 „ „ West. Australia 7.4 „ |M According to our own Statistician the. cost of living in the four chief centres of New Zealand in the chief food groups has increased ■since 1913 by something like 33.2 per cent. This is bad enough, but it compares very favourably with the increase of 51.8 per cent, under a Labour-Socialist Government in Queensland. ;'

The protest made by the chairman of directors of the Wellington Gas Company, Mb. C. P._ Knight, against the unfair position in which ■ public companies are placed in competition with municipal enterprises is well founded. Public companies are taxed—very heavily taxed just now—municipal enterprises which cqmpete with them escape taxation. The result is in many cases that the municipal enterprise can undersell its rival, at the expense of the taxpayers generally. The Wellington GSs Company, for instance, has to pay rates and taxes, and these have to be added to its working costs. The Wollington_ City Council, which sells electric light and power in competition with the Gas Company, is given an unfair advantage by reason of the fact that it pays no rates or taxes. In this ca'se the shareholders of the Gas Company are seriously prejudiced. ' But the matter has a wider aspect. Tho exemption of municipal trading enterprises from taxation means that those who are supplied through these, enterprises escape taxation at the expense of the rest of the community. Why should gas consumers be called on to pay taxes on the gas they use—for that is what it amounts to—and electric light consumers escape taxation? A municipal enterprise which competes with a private enterprise should do so. on an equitable footing, and not' at the expense of the taxpayers generally. _ In. England and elsewhere municipal trading enterprises pay taxes as a matter of course.

Gratification at the announcement, on tho respectable authority of President Wilson himself, that the "freedom of the seas" issue is dead will no doubt be tempered in many minds by baffled curiosity as to what he really meant it to involve when ho raised it. No one seems to have understood exactly what the President aimed at -when he set out as the second of his "fourteen points":

Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas', outside territorial waters, alike in peace and war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by inter-

national action for the enforcement of international covenants.

Intimating as he now does that the freedom of the seas issue is dead and that this is a good joke against himself, he adds that the issue concerned the rights of neutral?, but that under the League of Nations there will be no neutrals—the League will fix naval codes arid regulations. Apparently the President's original idea was that neutral ships should be as free to come and go in war as in peace, and incidentally to supply blockaded belligerents under the noses of blockading warships. The lines on which lie proposed to develop this remarkable proposal remain an unsolved mystery. In its total-effect, however, his pronouncement is the most optimistic opinion yet advanced with authority in regard to the proposals of the League of 'Nations. The obvious implication is that he believes the League will be able to establish a control and regulation of sea routes and sea traffic which even Britain, to whom eccui , - ity of sea communications is vital, will be content to accept in lieu of the control now established by her Navy. . * * # *. The element of internationalism in the disposal of the ex-German colonies in which South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand are chiefly concerned 1 is being so whittled down that it seems' likely to disappear. It iB now reported that an agreement has been reached under which inhabitants of these territories will have the right at any time, by a public vote, •to merge their political identity with that of tlw mandatory countries. The arrangement, ijo doubt, is just, "but from the point of view of this Dominion and others.it offers-no obvious advantages' over the per-, manent maintenance of the mandatory system. -This system-seems to c'it'er all reasonable facilities for efficient administration and at the same time'it sets a standard which is worthy of wider application.