THE RACING REPORT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1017, 13 July 1911, Page 4

THE RACING REPORT.

A CURIOUS FEATURE. WHAT WIDE HAPPEN IN 1912-13. Now that aggrieved racing clubs are flooding the Minister of internal Affairs with protests against the treatment accorded them by the Racing Commission, a careful scrutiny is being directed at the Act authorising the appointment of the Commission (says the Wellington Post). The public has Mr Buddo’s own word tor it that the validity of the Commission’s recommendations are being enquired into, and the suggestions that there are flaws in the Act have been freely mooted. One suggestion was that the Commission had no power to create new clubs, and that, in having allocated a totalisator license to a racing club at Te Kuiti and two other places which were formerly without a permit, it had prejudiced its distribution ol its favours as a whole. This suggestion, however, can have no foundation. The words of the Act authorised the appointment of a Commission “ tor the purpose of determining the racing clubs to which licenses are to be granted. . .” There was, it appears, nothing whatever to prevent the Commission recommending permits to twenty new clubs it it saw fit, so long as it kept its total allocation of permits within the 250 specified in the Act. But the curious feature of the Act is its absolute silence regarding what is to be done in the racing season which follows that ot 1911-12. A careful perusal of the Act shows that the Commission was, as already explained, set up “ for the purpose of determining the racing clubs to which licenses are to be granted under

Section 50 of the principal Act in the year (and those three words are the important feature) commencing on the first day of August, ign.” There is nothing respecting the following year, dependent on the Commission’s finding, except it be the belief of Parliament that what is done by the Minister one year under the Commission’s recommendations will be followed as a matter of course in succeeding years. But the Act does not say so, and Mr Buddo may not always be the Minister of Internal Affairs.

On the contrary: The Act states that “every license issued by the Minister of Internal Affairs under section 50 of the principal Act in respect of any year alter [mark the words] the 31st day of July, 1911, shall be issued in respect of a single race meeting, and shall specify the number of days on which the totalisator may be used at that meeting.” Here, it is claimed, is complete scope for the present Minister, or any Minister who may succeed him, to entirely alter, just as he sees fit, the allocation of -permits which may be made for the racing year 1911-12.

The Act passed last year repeated paragraph (a) of section 50 of the principal Act. Now another curious fact is here brought to light. Paragraph (a) of section 50 (which gives the Minister power to grant licenses to use the totalisator) set out that before a license was issued the application was to “be referred to the senior magistrate of the provincial district in which the racing club is established for his report and recommendation thereon." But that has been swept away, and (in its place almost it may be said) is paragraph (5) of section 6 of the Act of last year, which enacts: That nothing in this section shall take away or in any manner affect the powers of the Minister. . . . to grant or refuse in his absolute discretion any license in any subsequent year—that is to say, subsequent to 31st July, 1912 ! It is suggested by the critics of the Act that Parliament has delivered itself into the hands of Mr Buddo. And it is difficult to say what even Mr Buddo will do next year if the deputations from disappointed racing clubs are as insistent in their demands then as they are in their protests to-day.