A TRULY GREAT COMPANY.

Evening Star, Issue 7183, 11 April 1887, Page 1

A TRULY GREAT COMPANY.

Anything that affects the Australian Mutual Provident Society touches a large number of people in these colonies in a very vital part. We have all learned to regard this great Society with affectionate respect. Even those who have not the satisfaction of having a direct personal interest in the Society have a kindly word to say for it and a good wish. It has been managed with such a judicious mixture of prudence and fair dealing as to be now almost without enemies. It is, therefore, the more remarkable that in Sydney lately the Society has been the target for attack in the newspapers. AMr King, member of a large and wealthy firm of merchants in Sydney, has made certain distinct charges under two principal heads in his letters to the ‘ TelSgraph,’ and copies have come over here in numbers. Mr King passed through this Colony twice in the last eighteen months while engaged in starting the Canton Marine Insurance Company. At each visit he spent some little time in each provincial business centre, and his opinion is undoubtedly deserving of great weight. In a long letter he specifically charges the management with spending unwisely and extravagantly on freeholds and buildings for business premises, and gives figures and facts in support of his allegations. The prices paid for freeholds he holds to be too high, and the ornamentation of the office premises, where they are being erected, with Aberdeen granite and marble from Carrara, he holds to be waste of the money of the insured. This constitutes his first charge. To reply would require minute examination into values of land through the Colony, and of the actual cost of these ornamental trifles. We must confess that we are much more inclined to trust the management than Mr King in such matters as these. If the first purchase of land in Dunedin was a mistake, the second quite retrieved the error, and was a really good purchase. If Dunedin is a sample of what has been done elsewhere, the assured who have entrusted their money to the Society have very little to complain of. Moreover, it is manifestly wise policy on the part of a wealthy society like this to seize a time of depression to buy and build. Never was building cheaper or city land more reasonable. The power of building and buying when private persons find money tight is one of the great advantages which a continuing body like a company has over the individual. We do not clearly understand Mr King to attack this general policy. It is the detail—the too lavish expenditure upon legitimate objects —which he holds to be wrong. Mr King was at one time a director of the Australian Mutual, and writes now by no means as a .foe but as a candid friend largely interested in the Society’s sucess. His letters have aroused much interest at headquarters, and we shall look for the promised answer by the manangement, expecting to find them wholly satisfactory. On the other point on which Mr King and others complain we have something to say. Mr Goodlet, the chairman of directors, has thought it well to make an immediate answer to that portion of the criticism on the Society which treats of pensions and gratuities to the Society’s servants. His answer is disingenuous, in that, while professing to deal with both subjects, he really only offers a defence or explanation as to the gratuities given the Society’s servants in compensation for the extra work falling on them at the quinquennial investigations. Opinions are no doubt-di-vided as to whether it is a good plan to give employes bonuses or not. Some mercantile men find it to their interest to do so, while others reckon up such extra work when they are computing the amount of salary they propose to give their servants. There is no large question involved, as there is in the matter of pensions. Whether the Society give payment for extra work by way of gratuity or not is a detail of management which may well be left to the directors. But with regard to pensions the matter is very different. Pensions, save under exceptional circumstances,- are inexcusable anywhere, but particularly so in a huge wealthy Society such as the A.M.P., existing for the express purpose of affording opportunities for providence, and in whose service officers have presumably received by means of a salary a very full reward for the work they have done. We are glad to learn that an assisted assurance and superannuation scheme has now been set on foot for the benefit of employes, but it is nothing less than a standing disgrace to the management that this was left to the year 1885 instead of being begun thirty years before. As it is, owing to this neglect, the scheme will . not begin to be fully operative for another twenty years. Until then we trust that no more pensions will be granted. If it is necessary to do something for the support and comfort of valued servants in old age, we trust that a lump sum, and not a pension, will be the means adopted. Whatever may still be said in favor of military pensions, there is now nothing whatever to be urged in favor of civil pensions from the State, and the very climax of absurdity seems to have been reached when a company calling itself “ provident ” finds it desirable to give what is really a remedy for improvidence, or rather perhaps a temptation not to save.

it is evident, from the letters of Mr Robert King and others, that there is a good deal of smouldering discontent at headquarters with the management of late years in the Australian Mutual Provident Society. We are at a great disadvantage here in discussing many of the matters with which fault has been found in On a question such as that of pensions, which is a wide question of principle, this difficulty does not arise, and we trust that steps will be taken by policy-holders here to give expression to their opinion on this matter.