"GETTING THINGS DONE"

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 130, 29 November 1919, Page 6

"GETTING THINGS DONE"

When it conies to a matter of "getting things done," the politician's work is mainly to find the man. If it is engineering, the politician must find the engineer; if banking, he must find the banker; and so on. Lately the Government has appointed a forester, and' it has contracted with a concrete-building expert for sixty-six of the new Statebuilt houses. Calling to mind a few of the expert appointments made by tho Government — the exceptionable word

"expert" is used for lack of a more expressive one—memory recalls an imported geologist, a good man who served as well as the limitations of his position permitted, and who has been succeeded by a local man, equally good. Perhaps the- same sentence can be justly applied to the past and present heads of the Railway Department, whose post is the most highly-paid in the Government service.' Then there was the first Government electrical engineer, an outstanding example. Ho " created " the part, also tho Department and all its works; and he has left on New Zealand a constructive impress that will hereafter be found to be second to none. Ho.was, of course, too good, for this country to hold; he left for a higher-paid position in the Old Country, but there are those who say that he left through disappointment with the parochialism he had to contend with. Anyway, before his departure he achieved a great success, which a worthy successor appears to be capable of continuing and developing. Hydro-electric-ity in this country has been almost solely a professional, not a political, triumph. The politicians had really very little to do with it.

With forestry it is different. Here there has been great work to do in the political foundry, policy work requiring statesmanlike courage. Unlike the hydroelectric engineer, who had to win his own way, the Director of Forestry will find on arrival that a great deal has been done already to define the principles of his work. For those principles tlw Minister has fought battles, which will be permanent victories if the elections confirm them. All honour, then, to what has been done, in the political sphere, for forestry. Nevertheless, there will bo no success unless the expert also makes good. He himself is indispensable to " getting things dono" and to getting them done in tho right way; in fact, on his application of the defined principles the success of thoso principles will depend. And the same thing is true, in greater or less degree, of the expert service by which State insurance, trusteeship, post, telegraph, telephone, railways, mines, finance, valuation, taxation, education, agriculture, health, marine, statistics, and meteorology maintain, with- varying fortune, their various missions. On the whole, New Zealand owes a great deal to its experts, to the men who did and the men who do. New Zealand owes quite a_ much to them as to her politicians. And a specially high place must be awarded to tho experts who, in the last quarter of a century, havo served' under or in conjunction with the Departments of Agriculture and Lands. For several of these, like the hydro-electric engineer, started from practically nothing. They created their parts. And they have exerted a direct and increasing influence on the pastoral production and economic prosperity of tl:6 country.

There is one Department which, perforce, shortened sail to bare poles during the war period, and which will now have a chance to prove itself. That is the Public Works Department, which has a big opportunity to make 01 to mar in th. way of "getting things done." By political retirement, it is parting with a Minister whose principal purpose was to maintain a strong silence, and it may find in the near future a Parliamentary head with more scope and wider vision. On the efficiency of the Public Works Department a great deal will depend; it has fine traditions, hut the future calls for something bigger still. And this brief and necessarily imperfect survey of tha State's applied activities cannot conclude without a further reference to the new housing contractor, who promises what is almost a revelation—a £650 permanent house, roomy and complete, exempt from "SO per cent, of tho skilled work ordinarily attached to tha erection" of a wooden dwelling, not requiring wood-fencers or bricklayers or paperhangers; needing only 30 per cent, of painters' work; and reducing depreciation and insurance risks to a minimum. As all this lies in the region of the future, it is sufficient at present to say that if the anticipation is realised th-3 housing scheme will be one of the most solid successes that an expert has yet won on behalf of the State. Meanwhile, without trying to anticipate, there is sufficient evidence all over the country to show how much the country owes to the men'who "get things done";' and a tribute to them is pardonable at th. present moment, when the whole election atmosphere resounds with so many wild and whirring words that for tho most part mean nothing.