WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 December 1921, Page 10

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

THE CEMENT INQUIRY. REPORT OF COMMISSIONER. (Special Correspondent.) Wellington, Dec. 2. Though there were more important matters before the House of Representatives on Wednesday none of them aroused quite as much interest as did the presentation of the report of the Acting Chief Justice, in his capacity of royal commissioner, upon the grave allegations made by Mr. Robert Masters, the member for Statrford, against the cement companies and the Board of Trade. The tenoi of the report had been fairly generally anticipated from the facts disclosed at the enquiry, but thera remained a good deal of curiosity as to the wording of the commissioner’s findings and as to their significance. The House was not kept long in suspense. Mr. Justice Sims having made the issues plain and having briefly reviewed the evidence, proceeded to state his conclusions with the judicial precision proper to the occasion. They were in effect that the Board of Trade had not been guilty of impropriety or error of judgment, that the rises in price it had authorised were justified, that the companies had not charged unreasonable prices and that the agreements between them had not been illegal or criminal. RESTRAINT OF TRADE.

Th last finding, of course, had reference to the arrangement by whidh the Golden Bay Company suspended operation- ..nd received a bonus from the other two companies when it became obvious that the collapse of the market in March last had produced conditions which made it impossible for the three concerns to carry on at a reasonable trading profit. This arrangement, the Commissioner holds, was a restraint of trade, but a reasonable restraint having regard to the interests of the contracting parties and to the interests of the public. “It was not,” the report runs, “made to prevent people -from getting cement, or to stifle competition, or to increase the price of cement, and was not intended by the parties to operate to the detriment of the public in any way.” The commissioner emphasises his point by saying that the. price of cement has not been unreasonably high at any time during the existence of the ‘agreement and that there is no action the Board of Trade could properly take to disturb the arrangement. Public interests are not suffering and are not likely to suffer. PUBLIC OPINION.

So much for the judicial pronouncement. Public opinion on the matter cannot yet be very precisely gauged, but both inside and outside the House there is a feeling that Mr. Masters was badly advised in not allowing himself time for second thoughts before impugning the findings of the commissioner. The Minister of Industries and Commerce and the Board of Trade always are fair targets -for criticism, but a judge of the Supreme Court and the affairs of private people are not to be dragged lightly into the arena of political controversy. No one who followed the evidence adduced at the inquiry at all closely and without bias will doubt the soundness and the justice of the commissioner's findings. The order of reference may have been defective, as Mr. Masters insists it was, and the Government mav have been responsible for its shortcomings, but these were matters with which Mr. Justice Sim had nothing whatever to do. As for the suggestion that the Minister had been influenced in his attitude towards the companies by his personal concern for some of their shareholders, this was altogether outside the rules of the game and naturally provoked a retort .in kind. BENEATH THE SURFACE. Of course there were parts of the report that lent themselves to picturesque treatment. The commissioner’s nice distinction between proper and improper restraints of tade. for instance, was so subtle that one was left wondering just where the dividing line lay. But so far as the companies were concerned they appear to have emerged from the investigation quite unscathed. The Golden Bay Company, which was made the pivot, so to speak, on which Mr. Masters’ charges turned, has experienced many vicissitudes during the fourteen or fifteen years of its experience, paying only four small dividends during that time, but its management in recent years, at any rate, seems to have been broad based on the best business principles. It was the enormous advance in the price of coal, while its rivals were able to utilise hydro-electric power, which made it the weaker vessel when t • present arrangement was concluded. It is an open secret that this arrangement does not satisfy some of the people associated with the enterprise and that these people are mainly responsible for the manufacture of the bolts Mr. Masters has been hurling at the mange-