OFFICIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 71, 17 December 1937, Page 10

OFFICIAL RESPONSIBILITY

We notice that Dr. A. G. Butchers, head of the Education Department’s Correspondence School, has been delivering to the students of the Palmerston North Technical School an address which in some respects is an advocacy of a new political philosophy, and a new system of Parliamentary representation. We are. less concerned witn the merits of his suggestions than with the propriety of his action, as a public official and on a public occasion in making statements of opinion on questions of public policy. Discussing the question of equal payment for men and women he said, as reported:

On the basis of equal payment to men and women for work done by the individual, said Dr. Butchers, distribution would be fairer and any surplus on the present wages bill would not be poeketed by the emplovers but would be estimated and paid into the National Provident Fund. Out of that fund when the girl resigned her position to marry she would receive an independent income in return for services rendered to the community as a wife and mother and as each child came into the family adequate finance would lie available for that child to be brought up properly.

Dr. Butchers is entitled to his private opinions, but his official position precludes him from discussing such questions from the public platform. His indiscretion on this particular occasion is the greater, and the more to be deprecated because his remarks were addressed to anaudience consisting largely of immature young people in the formative period of their intellectual development. It was an address better suited to an audience interested in political economy, but in any case the speaker improperly exceeded his official province in discussing such questions in public at all. It may suit the Government to have the area and scope of its political propaganda gratuitously extended, but-we can hardly imagine that the public would relish the idea of State educational officials acting as political party standard-bearers.