PETROL TAX AND ROADS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 84, 6 October 1938, Page 8

PETROL TAX AND ROADS

It can fairly be maintained, Aye believe, with motoring associations generally, that taxation of road vehicles, in every shape and form, should be returned to the roads for their upkeep, service, and reconstruction, wherever necessary. In other words, road transport should be selfsufficing and self-supporting, as rail transport is supposed to be, though in practice it actually falls short of that ideal. Thus there is something

both anomalous and inequitable in the diversion of a considerable por-j tion of the petrol tax —4^d out of lOd a gallon—from road uses into the Consolidated Fund. This point is emphasised in the latest annual report of the Automobile Association (Wellington). The amount expended by the Main Highways Board last year totalled £4,113,000, while the sum collected in motor taxation was £4,523,484. Yet £1,723,168 from motor taxes was placed in the Consolidated Fund, and the Main Highways Fund had to be supplemented from loan money which only piles up the interest bill, now at the figure of £339,000 annually. This seems to us more like "robbing Peter to pay Paul" than good business. The reply is that the money is used to build "permanent" roads, but the Automobile Association rightly asks: What are "permanent" roads? Roads which appear permanent today may be obsolescent tomorrow with the development of motor transport. Ten years ago much money was spent on improving the Ngahauranga Gorge road; today the gorge is closed for complete reconstruction. The same process is visible everywhere. It may be that the new Ngahauranga Gorge road will be "permanent" and so also the new coastal road from Plimmerton to Paekakariki, but what is one to say of much, of the Great North Road from Paekakariki to Levin, despite all its new overbridges? The argument of the association that "roading requirements should, as far as possible, be provided from revenue moneys" is a sound one.