CALL FOR PRIVATE ENTERPRISE.

Evening Star, Issue 25169, 8 May 1944, Page 2

CALL FOR PRIVATE ENTERPRISE.

Though the prosperity of this country has been built up in the main by private enterprise, the Labour Government in its march to Socialism would gradually discard this system, which has worked so well, in favour of bureaucratic control. This is emphasised by the Acting Prime Minister's announcement concerning the setting up of an organisation to plan post-war reconstruction. Its executive will be composed of officers drawn from the Government departments and its proposals will be passed on to a committee of Ministers for consideration prior to final decision by the Cabinet. The new body is to be called the Organisation for National Development. It will be under the direct control. of the Prime Minister. Mr Sullivan says the procedure will follow closely the system that is in operation in Great Britain. That may be tho case in some parts of its outline, but to infer that the Government of

It.li© Motherland in committed to msthods that will ignore completely private enterprise is ridiculous. There is naturally in Britain a conI siderable measure of State control at ! present, but that is only during a wartime emergency, and when peace comes there will bo a reversal to the traditional methods of freo the new organisation to be established in this country the representatives i of the primary and secondary industries, who possess expert knowledge and wide experience, are to have no hand in its operations. Departmental officers, instructed by Ministers, are to carry out its functions. This unfortunate drift to Socialism and bureaucratic control is a phase that extends to other countries besides our own. The president of the Chamber of Commerce of tho United States recently declared: " Either private business or Government bureaucracy must save this country after the war is over. _ And they (the labour leaders of America) prefer private business." A timely brochure entitled ' A Call to Free Enterprise,' has relation to this subject. It was approved by the recent annual conference of the Associated Chambers of Commerce in New Zealand. The main theme of this publication is that the issue lies between bureaucracy and free enterprise—not between Labour and Capital, employer and employee. It is a larger, wider, moro dangerous issuo than that, yet month by month the encroachment Ot bureaucracy goes on unchallenged, which means as things are: "We are heading for the civil service, all of us. For bureaucracy has only that to offer. Bureaucracy can have, benevolence, goodwill, competence, a whole team of virtues, but it has no outside jobs. You work for tho State or else! " The Teal issue is whether or not the people of this country will bo content to be regimented, ruled, and subjugated. Will they give up their hard-won liberties? That is what will happen if New Zealand's Labour Government is allowed to reach its goal. We can hope that before that happens the people at the /polls will take measures to stop tho steadily-increasing infringement of their liberties.