Communications Followed Settlement.

One of the great difficulties in this country had been that settlement and pioneering effort had been forced to precede the means of communication. Consequently there were people who had gone far ahead of roads and railways, and who for years had lived cut off from other communities, without means of communication.

Throughout New Zealand there were 13,500 farmers and others struggling in the mud of the backblocks, without any access whatever, and one duty was to try to give these people decent communications—an object which he hoped would be well advanced by his five-year programme of backblocks road improvement.

Mr. Semple referred to his realisation, on his first visit to the district as a Minister, of the waste that was going on as a result of the abandonment of the East Coast line by a previous Government. There seemed to be nothing but rust and chaos on the route, he said, the previous Government having sold everything but the great girders which lay on the bank of the Mohaka River.