The Westport Times. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1872.

Westport Times, Volume VI, Issue 1026, 29 November 1872, Page 2

The Westport Times. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1872.

The Otago miners seem really in earnest in their efforts to protect their own especial industry, to amend defective laws and ameliorate existing evils, incident thereto. About the first of the coming month a mining conference will be held at Tuapeka, by delegates commissioned to represent tho various Miniug Associations of the Province. The subjects to bo discussed will be all of especial interest to their brother miners throughout New Zealand. The question of water supply, mining on private property, the establishment of a court of arbitration, the abolition of a host of useless forms and ceremonies in Warden's Court practice, the appointment of a Minister of Mines, the revisal of mining rules and regulations, a more strict and equitable defining of discretionary powers now entrusted to Wardens, and the initiation generally of such action as may best improve the status of the miners, will all have careful and matured consideration. That such concerted action among miners has become absolutely necessary, must be self evident to the most casual observer. Mining, as an industry, is as yet but in its infancy, barely more than twenty years having elapsed since the duty first devolved upon Colonial Governments to devise laws for its regulation ; but which laws havo been ever since undergoing mutations and emendations to render them sufficient to meet the ever varying exigencies of mining detail. The ground work of our New Zealand mining laws was wisely adopted from the Victorian code, which having borne the previous test of actual practice proved a reliable foundation, but the cumbrous and ricketty structure since reared thereon has been the work of legislators who have known nothing, or next to nothing, of the actual working details of milling, and who, in their attempt to legislate, have contrived a motley and patchwork tissue of contradictory statutes, unintelligible eveu to the initiated, exasperatingly confusing to litigants, and so palpably useless for tho purpose whereto designed, that the authors in their very helplessness have been compelled to entrust tho administration of mining laws to stipendary officers empowered to decide at their own discretion the merits or demerits of each particular point at issue, and to adopt or reject such of the multiform clauses of acts and goldfields rules as may, for tho nonce, seem to them most equitable or expedient. Hence the ' glorious uncertainty of the law' in the adjudication of mining disputes, and the necessity that has arisen for men who have lived and worked under goldfields administration to step to the front and endeavor to bring such influence to bear as may remedy the existing evils under which they suffer. The time was when a Miners' Association existed on the South-west Goldfields, limited in somo degree to the discussion of matters of purely local import, but yet capable of undertaking far more comprehensive duties. "Why tho Association held, at the best, but a fitful existence and slowly pined away until it dropped almost out of recollection, is a moot point hardly worth present discussion, but the opinion is strengthening and daily forcing itself upon the minds of all interested in mining matters, that the seif-protective tactics adopted by the Otago miners are becoming doubly necessary on the Nelson Goldfields. It only needs the initiatory movement, on the part of a few members of the mining community, to rapidly expand into a healthy organization, powerful alike to remedy existing evils and tending to beneficial results hereafter.