HIGHLY QUALIFIED

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 59, 11 March 1937, Page 8

HIGHLY QUALIFIED

Extract from the address of Mr. Parry, Minister of Internal Affairs, to the Municipal Association's Conference at Timaru:

To this end, Cabinet has agreed to the appointment of a highly-qualified town-planning officer ...

There seems to be something familiar about, that phraseology, as if the same, thing had happened before, years ago. Memory refuses to say when. Nevertheless, the Cabinet decision (the 1937 one) to appoint the officer will be greeted with renewed hope—hope based not so much on the "highly-qualified" appointee as on the qualifications of his Minister to see that some use is made of a highly-qualified public servant. When a Government buys expert brains, there must be qualification at both ends of the transaction. Can it be said that, on the average, the failures following Gov-i eminent purchase of expert services have been failures of the servant?

Has.it not been a fact, as a rule, that an adviser qualified to give highquality advice has met with a .Minister or a Cabinet not sufficiently highly qualified to give the advice application? Or, shall we say, too highly qualified in the arts of party politics, whereby much expert advice is side-tracked into the only place where it is deemed politically safe— the pigeon holes. But the quoted sentence is incomplete. Mr. Parry added that the highly-qualified town-planning officer is to be appointed "to the staff of the Internal Affairs Department." In recent years this Department has shown initiative in a different sphere distinct from and more or less remote from town planning—wild life. A Department that can take up a new point of view has already advanced one step towards high qualification, and away from the common faults of the official life. The Minister himself, Mr. Parry, also brings to the Department new viewpoints; so there is reason to hope that the contemplated Government appointment will be highly qualified at both ends, and will make the name of Internal Affairs as honoured in the congested cities as on the deer-stricken mountains. A town-planning policy, however, is like a local government reform policy in that it cannot succeed by persuasion alone. After the resources of compromise and advice are exhausted, there will still have to be some insistence by the Government if local inertia is to be overcome. The Minister that can put into town planning and local government sufficient compulsion to get things done without injuring himself in the kick-back is the Minister that democracy is looking for. He has not yet been found in this country. A town-planning officer and a Minister, both highly qualified, would be a great boon.