SUPERVISION OF LOCAL LOANS.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 145, 12 August 1926, Page 4

SUPERVISION OF LOCAL LOANS.

Most of the newspaper comment upon the Government’s proposal to establish a board to supervise the borrowings of local bodies has been favourable to the idea that some kind of supervision is desirable, and while some of The papers, obviously through not having thought much about the subject, give an uncritical approval to the Bill, others have been struck by those faults in the scheme to which we have already drawn attention. The weakest point in the Bill is its provision that the power to pass or veto a loan proposal shall be placed in the hands of a board which will include, and be largely dominated by, representatives . of Government Departments. To this provision the local authorities should offer uncompromising opposition. It is not only that the Departments are not qualified to pass judgment upon local loan proposals: the time has come for everyone to take a firm stand against the encroachments of the bureaucracy which appears to have enslaved the Government as it wishes to enslave the public. , Hardly a day passes now without some new evidence of the

alarming extent to which the affairs of the nation have passed into the hands of the public servants. Hardly a Bill appears which does not reveal the unhealthy decay of Parliament’s old-time insistence upon its authority as the maker or our laws: for in Bill after Bill we find a clause giving the Governor-in-Council, which is to say some Departmental official or other, power to exercise legislative functions. This grave evil must be warred upon. And if it is impossible for the Goyfernment to think of any plan of supervision which does not give Departmental officials the power of veto, then it would be far better that nothing should be done at all.—Christchurch Press.