REGIONAL PLANNING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 September 1941, Page 3

REGIONAL PLANNING

MR T. JORDAN’S SURVEY OPPORTUNITIES IN WAIRARAPA DISTRICT. IDEAL AREA FOR ADVANCING SCHEME. The concluding portion of Mr T. Jordan’s address on regional planning, given at yesterday’s luncheon of the Masterton Rotary Club, is published below. “The provision made for the preparation of a regional scheme is a common-sense one and is purely voluntary,” said Mr Jordan. “What has been done to give effect to it? Not long after the passing of the Act the Town Planning Board, constituted under the Act of 1926, appointed a very competent and experienced committee to prepare a report for the board on the regional constitution of the Dominion as a whole. They had at their command a very great store of information collected from Government departments and they personally travelled through the length and breadth of the land relating the departmental information to the geographical facts. They held public meetings and invited the public everwhere to come and express their views on the regional structure that they were building. A meeting was held in Masterton and evidence was given by local body men and in particularly by Pahiatua. The committee had formed a preliminary sketch to include Pahiatua with the Manawatu area. To this we did not 1 agree nor did Pahiatua. Their interests were with the Wairarapa, not with Manawatu. The committee made the necessary amendment to the boundaries. Finallj r they reported on a tentative division of New Zealand into 23 regions and a map was made accordingly. This decision was accepted except in two minor instances. There was no great division over these. It would seem then that the way was clear for a gazetting of the districts and the setting up of the regional committees. An attempt was made to begin in the Auckland area but when the local authorities were approached one or two of them plainly intimated that they would refuse to appoint a representative to the regional committee. They had given a foretaste of their opposition when the Town Planning Committee held its meeting in Auckland. It then became a question of whether the then Minister of Internal Affairs would exercise his power of appointing in their stead and thus set the Regional Committee on its way. The Minister declined to do his duty and the plan broke down. It has remained broken down ever since. VOLUNTARY AGREEMENT. “I have the Report of the International Federation of Housing and Town Planning delivered at Paris in 1937 and it is interesting to quote from the Czechoslovak statement: “ ‘lt is only through voluntary agreement between the public authorities . and the representatives of the interest- ' ed parties that work can be solved in L a democratic State, and not through authoritative order “from above.” Much r is thus effectively solved by agreed - curbing of private interests in favour I of public interest and collective enter- > prise. Private initiative is thus conserved and the public interest protecti ed. Public enterprise is more evenly t distributed proportionally to the ac- :, tual needs of the various regions of f the country, thus levelling up more ef- - fectively the differences in standards s cf living of the inhabitants of different - regions.’ 1 ADVANTAGES OF WAIRARAPA.

“As I have said above, our district, the land of Wairarapa, was accepted 1 by the Town Planning Committee as a region and I believe that there is no more homogeneous area in New Zealand. I have often thought it an ideal one in which to make a beginning with regional planning. You may remember that in the days before the Town Planning Act I took some part, not without opposition, in bringing together to the same council table representatives of the whole of the 15 local authorities to discuss our common problems, but we had no power and gradually ceased to meet. I should like to see the attempt made once more with the assistance of the Act of 1929. VALUE OF PLANNING. “Apart from its value for economic and industrial planning I have always valued regional planning very highly for administrative purposes. A great deal has been said of amalgamation of local bodies in this country and it is generally conceded that the elimination and absorption of very many of them is long overdue. You will remember that the present Government passed an Act which contained the germ of compulsory amalgamation andi it may be necessary to exercise compulsion in the last resort. I have said that if the regional committees were set up and the necessary stock-taking done, the results would be to.provide a set of facts that would leap to the eye and no reasonable body of men could fail to see the necessity for reform. Amalgamation would follow as a matter of course. I have for years looked to the establishment of a larger and more powerful unit of local government in this country with increased authority —in other words, for a greater devolution of governing power upon the local authority to the relief of the general assembly. “I was very interested to find a few years ago a Bill drafted by the late Sir John Salmon in 1912 for Sir Joseph Ward—a Local Government Bill, providing for the setting up of just such a local authority. He calls them provinces and divides New Zealand into 24 of which our Wairarapa is one. Unfortunately this Bill was lost in political strife and has never been revived. “SIGNS ON THE HORIZON?" “The present Minister of Internal Affairs, who is in charge of local government, has more than once expressed his belief in such a larger unit but no outward anc] visible sign of his belief is yet forthcoming. Perhaps there are the beginnings of signs on the horizon. Of recent years we have had regional committees of a kind for Centennial celebrations which were in turn adopted for patriotic purposes. We have used them also for recruiting and man power committees, for planning to take evacuated children and now for emergency transport control. “As recently as last week I endeavoured before a Parliamentary Committee, to suggest that in the case of the Erosion Bill, a similar committee consisting of nominated members ■ of the local bodies should be grouped together as a catchment board to deal with river erosion etc., in each region. The suggestion was evidently

premature for such a committee: the Bill as it left the House provides for the election of the catchment board members by the ratepayers of the whole area and there is no connection between'the existing local authorities as such and the new catchment boards to be appointed under the Bill. There is no cohesion. “In England the administrative value of the regional subdivision has been thoroughly appreciated. In the course of home defence the country has been divided into a number of regions and as a result of the experience with these, leading men in the House of Commons are urging that this experience gained under war conditions should be developed in time of peace, and the administrative functions of the regions enlarged and strengthened to bring about a further decentralisation of government. Committees have been appointed within the last couple of months to examine and report on the question.”