AXE AND TREE : A REPRIEVE?

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 8, 9 July 1931, Page 8

AXE AND TREE : A REPRIEVE?

To hear from Mr. Ransom that the decision to amalgamate the Forestry Department with the Department of Lands is not beyond review is particularly good news. If the silence— or comparative silence—with which tlie original decision was received has led any member of the Government to believe, that the country as a whole approves such amalgamation, that member is certainly misled. It was not one of those silences that give consent. It was the silence of people whose zeal for forestry is unabated, whose loyalty to the Department of Forestry has not diminished, but whose greater loyalty to New Zealand as a whole—a New Zealand faced with .serious financial trouble—has temporarily overborne their innate desire to defend one of the Reform Government's wisest constructive acts'. In the presence of the greater evil of depression and Budgetary crisis, the lesser evil of subverting the forestry policy may have been received with little comment, but it is none the less deeply deplored. The loss of the Department of Forestry as an independent unit would come more or less as a personal loss to many writers and speakers who had worked for departmental status for many years before Sir Francis Bell's masterfulness—his ability to hit a line of constructive policy and keep .to it—brought the Forestry Department into being. Friends of forestry existed then in all parties, irrespective of politicalism, and they continue to exist to-day; and while they have, in a broad New Zealand spirit, hesitated t6 embarrass a Government courageously engaged in the nasty work of retrenchment, they yet intensely dislike this amalgamation phase of retrenchment, and rejoice to hear from Mr. Ransom (who is Minister of Lands as well as Commissioner of State Forests) that the door is not closed against reconsideration.

No one has' recognised more than "The Evening Post" the need of economising. It would be vain to demand from a Government economy, and then to back-pedal by rejecting the economies in detail. But this proposed amalgamation is an economy so disturbing to settled policy that it should be examined as to its probable effects on the real interests of forestry, and also as to whether the actual £ s d saving likely to be gained is commensurate with, the degree of disturbance involved. We assume that the Forests Act would have to be amended; in that case, Parliament will have ample opportunity to . review the whole problem. If no depression had fallen on the country, the Department of Forestry would to-day have had no serious enemy, apart from those members of the United Party who were responsible for some criticisms of the in the party's original literature —criticisms which* are as out-of-date as the seventy millions loan on the back of which the Uniteds and their literature rode into office. The real critic of tlie Department of Forestry was the sawmillers—as the columns of "The Evening Post" some years ago abundantly eyid.encedr-aiK.l it is no

small satisfaction lo see that this week ihe representative of the sawmillers (Mr. Arthur Seed) took his stand wilh Mr. J. Deans, Mr. A. Leigh Hunt, and other champions of j ihe New Zealand Forestry League in urging on Mr. Ransom that the Forestry Department l>e not amalgamated (or that, if needs must, it be amalgamated with Agriculture rather than with Lands). The attitude of this deputation was as conciliatory and reasonable as was that of the Minister; there was no axe on either side. Apart froni the factor of depression and the economies it entails, we know of no one in the Labour Party anxious to use the axe against the Forestry Department merely because it is a Forestry Department; and certainly there should be no such person in the Reform ranks. Moreover, depression itself has found a palliative in forestry, for did not the last United Government, after ordering curtailment of State tree-planting, find its hand forced by unemployment : into a greater tree-planting season than ever?