ECONOMISING PROBLEMS

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 138, 8 December 1921, Page 4

ECONOMISING PROBLEMS

In Tuesday's issue of this paper was published a summary of the short career—now threatened with an early end—of the Department of Industries and Commerce. For years the Department was pushed away out of sight as a section of the Department of Agriculture; but in 1919 a Bill was passed, under the inadequate name of the Board of Trade Act, which established-a Department of Industries and Commerce. In giving new life toHhis moribund branch of the Civil Service—practically recreating it —the Government took great credit to itself, particularly by dwelling (in prospect) on the great career of constructive work lying ahead of the new Department, which was to be a co-ordinating and also an initiating force in the region of trade and commerce. Most of the newspapers and many business men joined in the applause, and it comes now as an anti-cljmax tovhear that, for retrenchment reasons, the Industries and Commerce organisation is likely to be reburied in the Department from the catacombs of which it was so recently disinterred. Eating their words cannot provide very pleasant diet either for politicians or press, and The Post is forced to admit that it would accept very reluctantly the reversal of the step taken under the legislation of 191.9. The intervening period of two yearß has in no sense provided a " trying-out" of the new Department. The fact is that the Department has had a sort of doubleheaded existence during that time, as it included a Board of Trade that was very much in .the public eye, while the nascent Department was not in the public eye; the result being th^t the part loomed larger than the whole. The winding-up of the extraordinary war activities of the Board of Trade obscured the building up of the normal peace functions of the Department itself; but it is to the latter, rather than the former, that the prospect of permanence belonged—had not retrenchment supervened, r

Apart from the retrenchment point of view, opinions might differ as to how far it is necessary or advisable to retain the peculiar powers exercised during the war by the Board of Trade, in the way of price--fixing, trade regulation, etc. But, so far as we are aware, there was no serious opposition to the development of an Industries and Commerce departmental administration until the public purse became light. The Department has many well-wishers, and has had np real opportunity yet to prove its worth; and the sympathetic references made on Monday at a meeting of the x executive of the Industrial Corporation of New, Zealand, by the president, Mr. C. J. Ward, have a special value as coming from the business side of the community. Though The Post has supported the principle of a retrenchment that means economy, there is room for much difference of opinion as to the application of that principle, and as to what constitutes economy. While there is no desire to embarrass the Government in the carrying out of what is a very difficult task, a general approval of economy cannot be translated into an acceptance of every hastily-prepar-ed scheme to bring down expenditure—somehow or anyhow—to within an arbitrary figure. Nothing is more plain than that a retrenchment scheme, if it is to be just and effective, should be carefully thought out and should be applied with discrimination. It Bhould be ( the work of a well-informed man armed with a pruning-knife; not a running-amok by a man who waits till the eleventh hour, and then, being pushed,' rushes out with a slasher to cut'down something. If" The Post is correctly informed, there seems to have been a quite unnecessary precipitancy in the recent dismissal from Trentham Camp, of men who had- homes in the district; we are not convinced itha.t the cutting out of the school of instruction is, in defence needs, true economy. A statement on the subject by the Government is still awaited with iateveat.