Ministerial Responsibility

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32037, 11 July 1969, Page 12

Ministerial Responsibility

(Prom Our Own Reporter) WELLINGTON, July 10. Ministers should not be held responsible for the errors of technical people under their control, the retiring Commissioner of Works (Mr P. L. Laing) said today. He was speaking at a function attended by the Minister of Works (Mr Allen) and the chairman of the State Services Commisision (Mr A.

G. Rodda) to mark his retirement. Mr Laing said he found it impossible to believe that Ministerial responsibility should extend to technical errors made by the staff of a department He asked whether it would be reasonable to hold the Minister of Science personally responsible for the failure of a scientific experiment By the same token it was hardly reasonable to hold the Minister of Transport responsible for a pilot’s error.

He found it most upsetting that a Minister could be challenged in Parliament and called upon to explain reasons for a mistake by technical people in his department Such a position was not flattering to Parliament Mr Laing said that he and, he was sure, all the senior technical staff in the department would prefer to share, or in the final analysis to have the responsibility borne by the commissioner. There was a proper place for the explanation of technical errors—in technical journals where all relevant facts could be printed. Mr Laing referred to a tendency for other departments to assume responsibility for their own engineering work. He found this commendable, but warned against any wholesale disintegration of the Ministry of Works.

He said it had often been suggested that the Ministry might better serve the country if it were split into single-purpose organisations. But, he said, New Zealand was much different from Australia, where a single-purpose organisation was about the size of the whole Ministry in New Zealand. Moreover, it would not give engineers the depth of training that they now received. This view had recently been confirmed by independent management consultants. Mr Laing also called upon the State Service Commission to provide additional assistant commissioners to spread the work load at the top level.