The Press Monday, September 15, 1930. Economy.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20033, 15 September 1930, Page 10

The Press Monday, September 15, 1930. Economy.

A correspondent writes to us to-day expressing surprise that there has not been a stronger protest against the retiring arrangement proposed for Dr. Valintine. One reason of course is that no one likes to attack a Government through an individual, especially when the individual is sixty-five years old, and has served the State for thirty years at a smaller salary than he might have made outside. Another reason is that no layman knows whether the services which it is suggested Dr. Valintine will render are necessary and worth £SOO. It may be the case, though it is difficult to imagine that it is, that the new Director-General approves of the arrangement, and that what the Department is going to spend on consultations it is going to save in some other way. The point is, however, that no one before Saturday morning knew what the facts were, and most of those who have since thought about them no doubt feel that it is useless straining at such a mere gnat of extravagance and swallowing half a dozen camels. When it was suggested in the House on Friday that expenditure on doubtful railway lines should be suspended until the Railway Commission had said whether further expenditure was justified, the Leader of the Labour Party asked what was to be done with the two thousand men at present employed on these undertakings. Everybody knows what should be done with men who are employed unproductively; but as long as the Government allows itself to be driven by the Labour Party nothing will be done. The Government has even boasted that it is providing work j for more men than a Government has ever employed before, and the work of an enormous number of these men not only does not pay the country, but I makes it poorer with every shovel-full of earth they move from one spot to another. The construction of an un- j profitable railway line not only robs j the country of the whole cost of construction, but goes on robbing it permanently. And apart altogether from these unprofltably employed relief workers, there is the constantly grow- j ing army of State and local body j public servants which, five years ago, j numbered 82,000 and cost the country 184 million pounds per annum in wages and salaries. It is true that there have been worse examples than this in other parts of the world, and that some worse examples still exist. One of the leading English weeklieg the other day, in the course of an article expressing concern at the increase in the number of Civil Servants under the Labour Government, said that in pre-war Russia everybody was a Government servant of some kind or other; that French provincial towns contain " perfect warrens of clerks "labelled 'Bureau of Direct Contribu- '' 'tions,' or ' Indirect Contributions, 1 or "Something of the kind"; that Vienna is "packed with the surplus bureaucracy of an overstaffed and disintegrated empire"; and that every capital south and east of the Danube is " full of huge buildings in every one " of whose rooms a weak-eyed and in- " competent clerk fumbles with sheaves "of coloured paper, while rows of " patient victims sit waiting on a "bench." The situation is not yet quite so desperate in New Zealand, but it is bad enough, and it is at least interesting that the page containing the total number and cost of State employees has been dropped out of the Year Book since the present Government took office.