The Press THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 1950. The Public Service

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26205, 31 August 1950, Page 6

The Press THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 1950. The Public Service

Mr J. P. Lewin, in his presidential address to the annual conference of the executive council of the Public Service Association, raised some important issues affecting the efficiency of public administration in New Zealand. It is possible to agree with Mr Lewin that the j morale and status of public servants should be raised and that their rights as individuals should be preserved, and at the same time to hope that his views will not be misinterpreted, as they might be on the summary of his speech. As to morale, this is not only the result of good working conditions and adequate salaries, though they are necessary. It must also be based on the realisation that employment by the State is, in fact as w’ell as in title, public service, for which its officers should have something of a vocation. Mr Lewin seemed to imply that the present status of public servants was inadequately protected because applicants from outside the service were able to compete freely for the best positions. That is not quite so. An outsider cannot hold an appointment if the Appeal Board is not satisfied that he is clearly more suitable for a position than applicants from inside the service. If too many outsiders are found satisfying this condition, then the fault is in the service; and Mr Lewin should join in urging on the Government the need for a thorough overhaul of the Public Service—its recruitment, its training, and its organisation. This was needed 15 years ago; it is all the more necessary to-day because of the hasty expansion of the State’s functions. It is unfortunate that in the past the Public Service Association has tended to use its considerable influence not to ensure that the service moves with the times, but to protect the promotion' rights of the mass of its existing members. Few will quarrel with Mr Lewin’s hope that the Government will protect the political rights of public servants as individuals. But Mr Lewin might well have gone further, and pointed out the obvious limits to the exercise of these rights by individuals while they remain in the service. To pretend that these political rights are not qualified and restricted by official responsibilities is as unrealistic as to deny that they exist. In practice no Government can allow its officers to criticise its policy. In practice no responsible official would wish to express an independent and public opinion on Government policy. As Mr Menzies said in the Australian Parliament last year, public servants are. the ones who will suffer from unwise political activity. This, he said, would turn the service from being “highly respected, objective, and “ independent into something that “is the mere servant of the politi- “ cal mood of the moment, in which “the top ranks must be changed “ with every change of party “ administration ”. A public servant’s loyalty must be given impartially to his political chief and to the service. He has at all times a special responsibility for the welfare and security of the State. He cannot hold subversive opinions and remain a loyal servant. It would not be right to dismiss him if his subversive opinions were only suspected, and the sensible course is the one now adopted—to transfer “ poor security risks ” to departments where they have little opportunity for mischief. If suspicion is translated into proof, there is no place in the service for them, just as no private employer would continue to employ a man who was trying to ruin his business.

Mr Lewin and his association can serve their members, and the common good, by Considering in what ways they can help to improve the morale and status of the Public Service, which Harold Nicolson has described as “ the flywheel of “ the State ”, In doing so, they may derive some profit from a comparison with the British Civil Service, a trained band of cultivated men and women who have evolved a tradition, a corporate identity, and a common philosophy. Mr Nicolson says of the British Civil Service: “ The Civil Service “. . . became a disciplined cohort “. . . of inspired administrators “possessing the best brains which “ the universities could produce “ aad fired with a corporate loyalty, “ not to- this or that Minister, but “to such sublime abstractions as “ King and Country, Pallas Athene, “ and the State. . . . That know- “ ledge (of the Civil Service), un- “ like the higher inspiration which “ informs the policies of Cabinets, “is academic in its nature, being “ based on the scholarly assessment “of facts That is a noble conception of the men and women who are the essential and continuing machinery of democratic government.