FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 574, 4 July 1933, Page 6

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

H.

GEDDES

(To The Editor.) S'ir, — Please allow me to express my appreciation of your timely and thoughtful editorial of the 30th ult. on freedom of speeches. Your observations upon the vicious effect upon our social and economic life of the ever-eneroaching tide of secrecy and Star Chamber methods, are indeed very apt. Your summing up of the 'conditions developing is so sound and pertinent that it could with advantage be reprinted in every newspaper throughout the Dominion. This country appears to have entered a prolonged spawning period of control boards, and unfortunately too few realise the reality of the condition which so justly deserves your comment — "boards which inflict their faulty judgments upon harrassed business." The various produce control boards are so constituted that they can exercise a wide censorship over the publication of information of interest to the producers concerned and yet enjoy immunities on a scale equal to the arbitrary powers they are able t« exercise. An uncle of mine achieved the notoriety of having his name telegraphed all over the Dominion and the fact published in all the newspapers that he had been unseated from the chairmanship of an hospita) board for the reason that, being a nhareholder in a farmers' co-oper-ative association, his board had made more than a certain amount of purchases from the firm during the year, yet when a control board is set up it can appoint its members to lucrative positions at the expense of the industry, alsq while enjoying these emoluments appoint 1 these business associates to the sole distributing agency of the produce under their jurisdi'|tion. 1 1 The facility with which propaganda favourable to the board concerned can be promoted, or even manufactured, discloses another vicious feature of the control board system as we have it to-day, while the franchise for the election of members to the board appears to have for its chief object the retention in office of the 'ins.' Your statement that "more than half of the boards are superfluous" is quite a moderate one and a widfc reading of your article would do a great deal to awaken public attention to the gravity of the situation and the necessity for steps being taken to purge our economic system of what is developing into an insidious parasitical growth. I am etc.,

Rotorua, July 3.