TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 140, 15 June 1932, Page 6

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

EFFICIENCY IN POLITICS,

(By PRO BONO PUBLICO.)

I often wonder whether it is a good thing or a bad that we Anglo-Saxons never make a statesman or a politician pay for his blunders. If you think back a few years you will have no difficulty at all in calling to mind certain egregious blunders committed by Ministers. I am not going to specify them, because there is no party intention behind this comiment. • You can go back to the war period and as far before that as you like, and you will find plenty of examples of administrative ineptitude, often extremely expensive. The point is that in no single instance was the, per)>etrator made to suffer for his blunder. I can recall eases in which men had to drop out of politics because of something they said or left unsaid, but never because of something done, or something left undone. Neither the politicians themselves nor the public seem to distrust an incompetent man, even if he has proved himself a failure. This is surely an extraordinary position, that a man may waste money in administration, may fail to carry out his job at a critical time or may make a mess of his Department and yet be returned to Parliament again and again and even included m Ministries. I don't know what the explanation of this paradox may be, unless it is that the public do not expect a politician to be efficient. On the other hand, of course, the public do expect the politicians to be moral, and it is certain that if a politician were suspected of accepting a bribe he would not survive an election. But it seems that if a politician is a decent, well-meaning man, though incompetent, he will suit the public. It is true that ability and brains get into Parliament and stay there, but they must not be very conspicuously displayed. Some of the ablest men we ever had in Parliament in New Zealand were hard put to it to keep their

seats. . I have seen it argued seriously tliat this is as it should be, that Parliament should represent the average man, that its motives and its reasoning should be those of the average citizen. But candidly, the logic of it does not appeal to me. The country must have been thinking along wrong lines if it can regard incompetence with equanimity. . Whether the depression will shock us out ot our complacency remains to be seen. I think that before we are through our troubles we- shall all of us, men and women, employers and employed, rentiers and labourers, politicians and voters, be pretty sick of things, and especially shall wc be verv discontented with the Government. But whether we shall be sufficiently discontented to insist on something like efficiency in politics, I take leave to doubt, because efficiency never has been really popular with democracies.