The Press THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1946. Administering The Dependencies

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24984, 19 September 1946, Page 4

The Press THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1946. Administering The Dependencies

Section 32 of the Finance f Act amends section 19 of the Finance Act, 1931, which brought the Samoan Public Service and the Cook Islands Public Service under the control of the Public Service Commissioner in accordance with the Public Service Act, 1912. The 1931 legislation modified, accordingly. the Cook Islands Act, 1915, and the Samoa Act, 1921; but a wide-open ■ escape clause enabled any officer or class of officers ( in both dependencies to be appointed and to serve on terms other than the section prescribed. This sitpation is not radically altered by the new legislation, which appears to be designed to resolve any doubt whether the 1931 enactment empowered the commissioner to make appointments to the islands service as well as to control it and to validate appointments made on the assumption that it did. What calls for some comment is the fact that nothing in the Cook Islands Act, 1915, or the Samoa Act, 1921, indicated that the governments of those days saw any need to make sure that officials appointed to the administrative service of the islands would be specially qualified for work among and for the island peoples, or to define suitable standards of qualification, or to regularise, within or outside New Zealand, any -system of specialised training for such appointments. The Finance Act, 1931, had th 6 same significance, which was emphasised, by including a fairly important change in the administrative system of the dependencies among the miscellaneous provisions of a public revenues act. Since then, 15 years have passed, and for nearly 11 of them the present Government has been in office, from time to time professing extraordinary zeal for the welfare of the islands people and, latterly, in the Canberra Pact and in the drafting of the World Charter and in the trusteeship discussions of the General Assembly, reinforcing its professions and committing itself to distinct obligations in fulfilling them. Yet it remains true that those 11 years have parsed without any real, which must mean sustained and systematic, effort to reform the administrative theory of the acts of 1915, 1921, and 1931, or to reform it in practice by seeking specially trained and qualified men for island posts. Murray’s example in Papua has not been followed, as it could have been and should have been. It is not suggested, of course, that the Finance Act, 1946, is the place where new aims and plans should be unfolded. It Is, perhaps, necessary and fair to say that, at the moment, when the futqre of trusteeships and the shape of possible South Seas regional co-operation is uncertain, plans caqnot. be completed. But it is fair and necessary to say that after 11 years the Government should have made some advance towards administrative reorganisation: based on principles of personnel training and selection, or should at least have declared its purpose of adopting them. It is not enough, after IX years, that the Prime Minister should be able to claim that 27 boys and girls from Samoa (four European) are holding scholarships in New Zealand, their education here being intended (with dubious wisdom) to fit them for leadership in Samoa and to promote the ultimate self-government of Samoa; or that 14 pupils attend the post-primary school in Samoa; or that, as the report on the mandated territory says, the satisfaction of the Samoans with their way of life is evident in conditions “ socially “ sound, economically prosperous, “and politically stable.” All this may be true, and encouraging; but it remains true, and discouraging, that New Zealand’s administrative practice in this native field is in one respect, and fundamentally, backward and uninformed. The Finance Act is a reminder.