The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE FRIDAY, JULY 20, 1917. UPPER WANGAEHU ROAD DISTRICT.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 20 July 1917, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

FRIDAY, JULY 20, 1917. UPPER WANGAEHU ROAD DISTRICT.

(With which is incorporated The Taihapo Post and Waimarino News).

A subject that deeply interests a very large area of settlement in this district, a case of hardship that settlers have every moral, legal, and even every political right to have removed was incidentally referred to in these columns yesterday. We mean the refusal of the Hon. G. W. Russell to allow the Upper Wangaehu Road District people and surrounding settlement to ifl.ail themselves of those laws of the land which have been the % means of rescuing thousands of farmers from disability and injustice foj; the last thirty years. Why the Minister should over-ride this law is indeed inconceivable; why he should place his personal views between these people and their right to whatever present statute law provides, no fair-minded person can fathom, simply because to a fair-minded person the blocking out of any section of the community from their rightful access to the law could not be thought possible. The Upper Wangaehu Road District is suffering a peculiar hardship. Some person, in early times, evidently marked off county borders frojn a map; he had never been .over the land to ascertain whether the Great Architect had not arranged topographical matters that would render man’s boundaries positively ridiculous. It is so glaringly apparent that a huge blunder was perpetrated by the person who scrawled the map, that it should be the Minister’s first care and duty, the country’s duty, and the duty of everybody else involved to see that the absurdity which costs settlers in the road district some thousand pounds a year should be terminated as rapidly as possible. Here is a Road District entirely cut off from the rest of the county in which the map lines included it, by natural conformation 'of the country. Nature has finally and definitely,decreed that it was to have no ready intercourse, no interest in common wijjh the County it is roped in with, and it became a Road District perforce of that very fact. It has gone on for years wastefully paying hundreds of pounds a year to its alien partner across the rivers and mountspins, until the time has arrived when roads must be made if land is to produce and the business of the country be allowed to proceed and grow, and yet the Minister deliberately blocks access to the only means far-seeing statesmen and parliaments have provided. The Hon. Mr. Russell may be one of those who still have the old notion that New Zealand should never have given up provincial government, and his views may have so possessed him that he involuntarily follows a course leading back to provincialism. It is evident he has not any intimate knowledge of the country hereabout; that he has never been over it, or he would not insist upon trying to perform the impossible. It is nothing short of ludicrous to tell intelligent settlers they must merge into so unnatural a partnership. The Minister has not realised that the County machinery cannot be got to operate in the Road District,

and that the Wangaehu settlers would be in a much worse condition than they are now. Surely a Minister who cuts a large area of settlement off from its just right to an exercise of statutory provisions should understand what he is talking about. Are the heavy, unreasonable burdens the Upper Wangaehu settlers are now groaning under nothing to the Minister whose first duty it seems is to remove oppression? So extreme is the case of these settlers that we are entitld to question whether Mr. Russell is in possession of a portfolio that he can justly and intelligently handle? If he had in his own constituency a large body composed of New Zealand’s best settlers compelled to pay six or seven hundred pounds to another body it was impossible to link up with, obtain any benefit from, with whom there could be no community of interest owing to natural barriers, would Mr. Russell, or dare Mr, Russell, tell his constituents that they must continue to pay, to go without roads, and all because he was consumed with a fad in favour of provincial government. We want, and we expect the Minister to mete out similar treatment to the Upper Wangaehu settlers as he would find it advisable to give to a similar body in his own electorate. Nature has finally decreed that the Upper Wangaehu should never be a part of the Wanganui County, will Mr, Russell still oppose his will to that of the Great Architect? There is widespread ignorance about the progress of this rich, producing district, and sequentially of its real and pressing needs, and the Minister obviously largely shares in this dearth of knowledge. We were always under ’the impression that laws were enactea more to protect the minority than to benefit the majority, but Mr. Russell evidently thinks differently; the minority with him have no rights at all, they must be sacrificed, offered up on an altar of some Ministerial fad. This Upper Wangae-

hu case is so extreme that War matters should not be allowed to stand in the way of relief being given. It may be said that it has already gone on for years, but the time has come when the annual free gift of hundreds of pounds must be discontinued if the roads of the district are to keep anything like pace with increased production. Half-a-million’s worth of wool came out of Taihape’s back country last year; this alone ought to be an indication that settlers cannot make and keep roads while being so unnaturally 'linked up that they have to subsidise another body from whom they get nothing in return. We sincerely hope that the Minister will review his decision; make those investigations that will enable him to understand that this is no ordinary case; that it is not a move to have rates spent in accordance with some particular person’s idea; that it is not a difference between men in the one district; that the County Council sees the stupidity, the unjustness of their

partnership with the Upper Wangaehu and are commendably assisting irr endeavouring to have the wrong put right. It is a blunder unwittingly niaoe by the man who originally marked off the County boundary, and even if there were no law to give relief Parliament would be justified in removing the disability. We Cannot believe the Minister will- persist in perpetrating the outrage on Upper Wangaehu which compels settlers to rate themselves to the extent of six or seven hundred pounds, which is taken under cover of a fictitious partnership, and speiTl for the benefit of sett/fers by another body a hundred miles away from where it was taken. No wonder the Upper Wangaehu roads require many thousands of pounds to passably reinstate. Upper Wangaehu settlers are buffeted about, and if they merge into any County a huge loan is absolutely necessary, and this they are told must go to be spent by the County also, a county with which they can have no natural or workable alliance. We recommend the subject to the Minister’s reconsideration.