Officials and the Law

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21354, 22 December 1934, Page 14

Officials and the Law

We printed the other day some extracts from a very curious and disturbing letter written to the Christchurch Drainage Board by the Public Trustee. The Order-in-Council authorising the board to convert its loans provides that applications i'oi conversion shall be accompanied by the securities to which they relate, the object being to ensure that the board shall have proof that the applicant is in fact the holder of the securities he claims to be entitled to convert. The Public Trustee has suggested to the board that it should agree to waive this provision in the Order-in-Council and to accept a certificate showing particulars of the debentures held. He adds in his letter that the Treasury and the Audit Office have been notified of the proposal and have approved it. On the question whether it is desirable to insist on the forwarding of the actual debentures there may be room for difference of opinion. The Public Trustee suggests that the procedure is unnecessarily troublesome and costly. On the other hand, the lesson of recent financial scandals in Great Britain, Sweden, and France seems to be that bonds and securities cannot be verified too carefully or too often. But the important and really disturbing aspect of the Public Trustee's letter is its cool assumption that the law of the country is for the special convenience of public officials and can be set aside or varied by them at will. This, surely, is droit administratis in its most vicious and objectionable form, for its implication is that there is one law for officials and another for the private citizen. We do not know on what grounds the Christchurch Drainage Board refused to comply with the Public Trustee's request; but we hope that it was because the board did not want to be a party to a premeditated illegality.