THE TYRANNY OF REGULATIONS.

Evening Star, Issue 23833, 13 March 1941, Page 12

THE TYRANNY OF REGULATIONS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —After reading the protest . of Friendly Society ” against the paralysing and destruction of the splendid beneficial services of our friendly societies m New Zealand, and their coming displacement by “ a high-handed, bureaucratic deparlment ” run from Wellington, 1 paused to consider the consequences of our tremendous trend toward centralisation and the dangers threatened by the insidious and revolutionary changes that oan be made by powers given to make regulations and rules which have the full force and effect of laws. Some recertt Acts give such illimitable powers that the regulations made under them can be changed or supplemented without the approval of Parliament or public notice. In effect, this amazing method or form of action may be called administrative absolutism, which is a travesty of popular representative government, and the antipodes of true democracy. Is it any wonder that the great majority of doctors of high standing in New Zealand are unwilling to slavishly submit to the astute regulations made for medical services. Another most objectionable feature of such departmental regulations is that they are so framed as to be free from judicial review. One may also reasonably complain that regulations which may be so altered as to take away at any time

rights given by such regulations are outrageously unjust. All these valid objections to government by such methods are incom)>atible with the genius of wise, democratic, representative government. In ancient limes primitive Governments, with the absolutism of rulers, provided the pattern for Hitler and Stalin. They were totalitarian in every sense of that word. Slowly through the centuries there emerged the basic principle that the rights, liberty, and privileges of men were based upon laws made by a representative parliament, and not on the discretion of any party, faction, or group of men. Citizens of every democracy, if they wish to safeguard the democratic way of life from being wrecked, by being dragged down to the level of a Hitler or totalitarian State by the pretence of giving it larger scope by nationalising services, must learn to think independently and net be moulded into yes-men. They must recognise the true nature of conditions in which they are hot allowed to differ as the doctors are now claiming the right tc do, with the governing powers, any more than the people of a dictatorship, nor to work out freely, intelligently, and sincerely their differences with a Minister fev the time being in a Government. X am apprehensive that with the expansion of State services, with the alarming increase in “ dictatorial bureaucratic Government ” run from Wellington, the danger is approaching, unless controlled by public opinion, of features of totalitarian control showing their ugly head in Hew Zealand. This will mean retreat ami retrogression. It will he the abandonment of a groat democratic advance and a return to that which history and experience have alike discredited. We must not sit idly by and allow the ship of State to drift, as time goes by, unheeded towards the rocks of democratic disaster.—l am, etc., Jurist. March 12.