The Dominion SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 1931. THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 144, 14 March 1931, Page 6

The Dominion SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 1931. THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT

People in normal times are disposed generally to accept the weaknesses of the Parliamentary system and of the machinery of government as unavoidable evils, calling for protest only when y become qxasperatingly glaring. This spirit of tolerance is due p y to the characteristic dislike of the British to any tinkering with t constitutional machine, and partly to the unwillingness of ** Pohtical party in power for the* time being to. embark upon changes wh ch might react to its own disadvantage in an election. This attitu is well expressed in the saying, “Better the devil you know than the devil vou don’t. ' . . When grave national emergencies arise, emergencies apparent y beyond the power of the political system to meet by the usua expedients of statecraft, public opinion becomes more critical of the government machine, and more impatient, of the inability of Par . mentary groups to rise to the occasion in a national spirit. It is becoming increasingly recognised that the elucidation of sue. technical questions as economic policy, unemployment, and so on, is a problem beyond the capacity of the average member of Parliament to grasp, and even if it were, it would be impossible for Parliament in the time at its disposal to deal with satisfactorily. . Apart from the extraordinary necessities of the times, modern conditions of life and the multiplicity of social and economic problems have made of this incapacity a serious fundamental defect m government which sooner or later must be remedied.. .It was with the object of discovering some remedy that the British Committee on the Machinery of Government was constituted in July, 191 /. It consisted of Lord Haldane, Mr. E. S. Montagu, Sir Robert Morant, Sir George Murray, Sir Alan Sykes, Mr. J. H. Thomas, and Mrs. Sydney Webb, and its function was “to inquire into the responsibilities of the various Departments of the Central Executive Government, and to advise in what manner the exercise and distribution by. the Government of its functions should be improved. The committee reported in January, 1918. That little has been heard of it since is no doubt due to the national idiosyncrasy dislike of change already referred to. In the midst of our present perplexities, however, some of the main principles recommended are worth noting. With regard to the formulation of policy the committee emphasised “the duty of investigation and thought, as preliminary to action,” the importance of “organised acquisition of facts and information,” anti of the personnel employed in this work. Greater responsibility would thus rest upon the State departments, but as an off-set against the encroachments of bureaucracy, advisory committees of Parliament, parallel to the various departments, would meet the respective Ministers, and among other duties, supervise the general tendency of their routine administration. Ministerial authority and that of Parliament would thus be strictly conserved. This plan on the face of it does not appear dissimilar to our own system, except that it brings policy and administration into closer working contact, and places strong emphasis on the importance of exact information as a basis of policy. Efficiency in government is, of course, dependent, upon the power of Parliament to function effectively and expeditiously. As things are at present any attempt to improve the machinery of government would be frustrated by the deadlocking influence of a three-party assembly. The present House of Commons was recently described by The Times, London, as “a Parliament with no clear mandate to do anything except frustrate in turn those policies which each party in turn declares to be essential to the national prosperity. In New Zealand to-day we have an instance of this policy of frustration in the declared intention of the Labour Party to block so far as it can the Government’s proposals. Fortunately the sense of national responsibility .inspiring the Reform Opposition should prevent these tactics of barren obstruction from creating the deadlock of distraction. Nevertheless the risk of executive paralysis is there, and should induce electors to reflect whether the third wheel should not be eliminated from a machine sufficiently complex without it.