The Sun THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1928. SUSPICION INSTEAD OF SUPPORT

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 327, 12 April 1928, Page 8

The Sun THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1928. SUSPICION INSTEAD OF SUPPORT

'THEBE is a danger of the prospective inquiry into Aucklancfs * transport problems becoming an expensive fiasco. This risk is due to the attitude of several representatives of suburban local bodies toward the personnel of the commission. It is thought almost to the extent of assertion that one of the two Australian experts will prove to be an impartial judge or a prejudiced witness, whichever way anyone chooses to look at his position.

Bumour, which runs much faster and more cheaply than either trams or motor-buses, even talks about a boycott of the commission. It is right that the mood and grievances of discontented local body administrators should be ventilated in the open, and revealed in all their shallow weakness. There is nothing like “cleansing the bosom of much perilous stuff.” In referring a few days ago to the Government’s appointment of the Commission of Inquiry, we observed that there had been no enthusiastic comment on the selection of the commissioners, and that behind such representative opinion as had been expressed there was a note of discontent. It had not occurred to us, however, that the discontent would or could take the form of suspicion against the integrity of any member of the commission. Indeed, it actually seemed as though the 'commission’s outstanding strength and unassailable virtue would be its neutrality.

It fell to the Mayor of Newmarket last evening to give shape to the suspicious thoughts of parish pump administrators. Mr. S. Donaldson, who never skulks around corners, declared openly that some local bodies considered the choice of Mr. W. G. T. Goodman, of Adelaide, to be unwise. Though their disapproval might not yet have been officially recorded, it certainly would be. It was explained that the grounds for dissatisfaction were that Mr. Goodman was conjiected with a tramways concern in Adelaide from which Mr. A. E. Ford, the Auckland tramways manager and other employees of the tramways department had come. For that reason, therefore, Mr. Goodman was not considered suitable to participate in an impartial consideration of the transport question. These grounds of disapproval are less solid than an Irish bog. The reflection upon the honesty of Mr. Goodman does not even reach the level bf a serious indictment of a competent engineering expert’s character. It is merely a silly suspicion, suggesting that the next inquiry'in the prevailing epidemic of commissions may need to be an investigation of the peculiar mentality of village administrators. Mr. Goodman’s place in the tramway history of Australia and New Zealand is fixed too high and much too firmly to be shaken by churlish, suspicious, and impertinent members of Auckland suburban local bodies. Unless time has changed the character of Mr. Goodman those who knew him in the past, when he devised a tramway system in Dunedin which has never failed to pay its way, and has enabled a canny town clerk to lay profits away in the bank, in the grim Otago manner, will assert readily that if there be any muddle in Auckland’s tramway and bus services, he. will condemn it, though its cause had been a blood relative’s fault. He may have, sympathy with his harassed pupils in Auckland, but he will have no sentiment about conditions. Even if Mr. Goodman were disposed to be impartial for “auld acquaintance sake”-—a supposition which is preposterous—neither he nor any other member of the commission could overlook the fact in cold terms of exact accountancy that the transport system here swallows public money and satisfies nobody. It is the plain duty of all local bodies concerned to rid their minds of base suspicion and help the commission to clear the way to profitable satisfaction.