Mr McLay alleges ‘jobs for the boys’

Press, 28 February 1986, Page 4

Mr McLay alleges ‘jobs for the boys’

By PATRICIA HERBERT in Wellington The Leader of the Opposition, Mr McLay, yesterday accused the Government of “cronyism,” alleging jobs for the boys and a penchant toward using taxpayers’ money for political propaganda. He began with the proposal to introduce Lotto, saying he had directed his colleagues to treat it as a conscience vote in line with the Labour caucus decision. This did not necessarily mean, however, that National would not take a policy position on questions of detail — how the game should be organised and how the revenue raised by it should \be administered. Mr McLay said he would expect the money to be distributed by a body similar to the Lotteries Board and with that degree of independence. Otherwise, he said, the proceeds from Lotto — and they had been estimated about $4O million a year — might become "a political slush found” cap- , able of being used by Labour politicians to win votes in marginal seats.

Asked if he really thought the Government had this in mind, Mr McLay said he did not know as yet but that it had been “quite prepared to give its mates all sorts of jobs in the Beehive and elsewhere.” This was a reference to the Treasury’s hiring of Communicor Consultants, Ltd — a firm owned by Mr Simon Walker, a prominent Labour Party activist — to advise it on its image problems.

Mr Walker is a member of the party’s executive and policy council and was its communications director before the snap election.

Mr McLay said his appointment to the Treasury job smacked of cronyism especially as a member of the Finance Minister’s office had sat in on some of the discussions.

There could be only one possible explanation for that, Mr McLay said, and that was the Government wanted to provide spme political direction to the others.

This was particularly so as the person concerned was himself a political appointee, he said.

He was referring to Mr Douglas’s press officer Mr Bevan Burgess. But the Secretary to the Treasury, Mr Bernie Galvin, said Mr Burgess was employed jointly by the Treasury and by Mr Douglas and that he had attended the meetings at their specific invitation. It had been thought that Mr Burgess’s background in journalism and public relations would be useful in the selection process, Mr Galvin said.

He also said that Mr Walker had won the contract because of the candidates he had been “the most attractive in all respects.” Mr McLay also received yesterday a theme from last year and attacked the Government for its Statefunded publicity campaigned on the goods and services tax. He said the advertisements gave no information on how to comply with GST but were designed rather to “soften us up to idea of having a different form of taxation.”

On another tack, he criticised the number of

political appointments, the Government had made, specifying that his objection was not one of principle but one of degree. His understanding, he said, was that there were now only 11 corps secretaries employed by the Tourist and Publicity Department left and that they were spread over only seven Ministers’ offices.

“What I am deeply concerned about is that it has now reached a stage where there has been such an erosion that come a change of Government he said. The transition process, he suggested, would be difficult because National stood to inherit a vacuum as the political appointments would be “out the door and down the stairs with their Labour Ministers.”

Mr McLay conceded, however, that some of the corps members had left of their own volition because they did not want to serve under a Labour Government. He said he could think of “half a dozen” immediatly in that category.