The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, APRIL 29, 1929 SORTING THEM OUT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 649, 29 April 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, APRIL 29, 1929 SORTING THEM OUT

THEBE THOUSAND POUNDS or a sum equal to the cost of * charitably relieving the distress of a thousand unemployed for nearly a month will be spent on the city’s municipal elections on May Day. If a better administration than that which the community has suffered far too long be seeured as a result of the poll and a big outlay, there will be no vehement protest. If, on the other hand, the prospective steep expenditure merely succeeds in returning the majority of the old brigade to mark time under the same uninspired leadership, the result will seem like another grievous waste of public money. The preliminary circumstances unfortunately promise general disappointment and what a wise old prophet in the Bible would have predicted as much confusion. Forty thousand ballot papers have been prepared for a confusing occasion. Each measures two feet in length and five inches in width (some frugal head somewhere has at least saved a long ribbon of paper through refraining from an extension of the width to half a foot). A naive calculator, giving elongation to his fancy has noted that these voting papers, if placed end to end, would reach out over fifteen miles into the country. Perhaps, for the guidance of ill-served electors, a better use imaginatively could be made of the grotesque papers. There appears to he enough to decorate the whole of the outside of the Town Hall and still leave sufficient to placard the former municipal fish market, all of the scrapped buses which helped to drag the transport system out of the City Council’s hands, and to paper sandwich-hoards for an impressive parade in Queen Street of the sixty-seven candidates who are scrambling for twenty-one seats in the city’s poor parliament. If used in a different fashion and the fifteen miles of ballot papers formed into coverings each the size of the Civic Square, it is doubtful whether there would be enough squares to hide all the weaknesses and shortcomings of an administration which, however impeccable in conduct and character, has carried Auckland into the municipal doldrums. It is to he hoped that the electors will not only dispel their notoriety for apathy and do their duty as citizens of a city that needs to he led into the front rank of municipal progress, hut will exercise patience and intelligence on reading the formidable list of candidates’ names and having read it with exasperation will plump for men who promise to provide an administration with new ideas and fresh vigour. The inevitable exasperation over the confusing scroll should he the most convincing evidence as to the need of a drastic administrative change. There is no excuse for the municipal slackness that has brought about a stupid confusion. The City Council has known for years that a simpler system of election was a necessary reform calling for early adoption and ready practice. It might he unfair to suggest that the present administration has enjoyed some advantages of a clumsy method of appointment, hut it certainly is fair to say that the council deliberately has neglected a plain duty in providing clear simplicity. Of course, the real reason for an unpardonable neglect is anything hut obscure. It has become the council’s had habit to move laboriously in ruts of its own making and to rely on public apathy for its maintenance. A sweeping change is needed, and only the electors can enforce it. Let the electors, even the most apathetic of them, devote an hour or so to a close study of the present council’s record of service, and they will find it extraordinarily difficult to discover outstanding and convincing reasons for its reappointment. That record is nothing more and nothing better than a serial story of municipal stagnation and extravagant stodginess. But it would he easy to find many irrefutable reasons for dismissing the administrators who have been most responsible for the council’s colourless service. The old administration needs a leaven of vitality and resourceful enterprise. Unfortunately the ballot-paper, which is like a herald’s parchment scroll, will promote many mistakes in selection, hut those electors who desire to see Auckland again become the most progressive municipal centre in the Dominion, should at least familiarise themselves with the names of the proved failures in administration and avoid the mistake of plumping for their return to complacent stagnation. ENTER THE TRANSPORT COUNCIL lIAVING named his Transport Council and defined the ** character of the great national work upon which it will first embark, the Hon. ~W. A. Veitch, Minister of Transport, will next be expected to make an important pronouncement for which the country is eagerly waiting—how much is it all to cost ? The ten men selected for the Transport Council cannot be expected to give their services for nothing. Apart from their remuneration, and the substantial honorarium that will naturally be granted to the chairman, their travelling expenses will run to a considerable annual sum. Against the personal constitution of the Council little criticism can he directed. The men chosen are very reputable citizens, no doubt equipped with a fund of information on various phases of motor transport. Several of them could scarcely he expected to subordinate their personal interests in the motor or transport businesses to a broad national judgment on questions affecting those concerns, hut that is a disadvantage which the Minister, fresh in the exuberance of office, could reasonably he expected to overlook. A business, man of practical outlook, whose denunciation of cement interests was a trial to the Reform Government a few years back, Mr. R. Masters, as chairman, fills a place the Minister himself might normally have occupied. In this case Mr. Masters earns his just reward. He was chairman of the United Party’s meetings last year, and a power in the Liberal revival. Nevertheless his elevation to the chairmanship of the Transport Council places the Hon. Mr. Veitch in a queer position. As head of the department, will he he a mere cypher, dominated by the council, or will he so dictate to the council that its meetings will be little more than an empty form? The position of the Transport Council appears to resolve itself to this—that here is a body for whose creation there was no semblance of a national clamour, and that individually and collectively it represents sectional interests, which, while none of them is in a dominating position, may prevent it from handling the really vital issues with freedom. ' The council may handle the unification of by-laws admirably, and contribute handsomely to the solution of other minor problems, but competent departmental officials could do the same at far less cost.