STATE INTERFERENCE

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 111, 7 April 1930, Page 9

STATE INTERFERENCE

IN MANY DIRECTIONS. MATTER OF NATIONAL CONCERN. (Associated Chambers of Commerce.) At a gathering of members of the New Zealand Dental Association held in Auckland recently, allusions were made to the growing tendency of the Government, througn its various departments, to obtrude upon the spheres of professional men. Doctors, dentists, lawyers architects and others, it was said, were faced with opposition from the State which was justified neither by the needs of the public nor by the shortcomings of the professions. The doctors and dentists had no objection to the State watching as closely as it pleased the medical and dental needs of children in the pubiio schools or of children and adults in other public institutions of the kind. They did not mind doing a great deal of gratuitous work themselves — that was the lot of their professions but they did protest against the State taking out of their .hands practice for which they had qualified by long years of study and labour, and handing >t over to officials, who might or might not be as well qualified, and who, in any case, would be a charge upon the taxpayers. OTHER EXAMPLES.

About the same time ,as the doctors and dentists were making their protests in Auckland the fruitgrowers in the Nelson district were laying their grievances against v an ineffective system of “Control' 1 before the Minister of Agriculture. Mr McKee, their spokesman, told Hon. G. W. Forbes that the handling of the growers’ fruit in Wellington last year had cost the growers £60,000 as a result of delay “for which control in Wellington was responsible.” The growers, it seems, did not suggest the abolition of control) but they wanted a strong callable. organisation that would fe really representative of tlieir interests. Here is another protest against Government interference with private enterprise even when the intrusion is wrappd up in the guise of industrial co-operation. Other examples of the results of State meddling with private enterprise may be gathered from the Railway Statement for the last financial year. The Wakatipu steamers showed a loss of £0,484; the departmental dwellings a loss of £65,176; the road motor services a loss of £5,879, and the railway sawmills and bush a loss of £22,067— a total of £98,596, against which refreshment rooms, bookstalls, advertising and some odds and ends returned only £21,226, leaving a net loss of £77,3/0. EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA. Mention of railways recalls the story told by a prominent “captain of industry” of what . befell the United States lines when at the beginning of the last year of the Great War they were handed over, tentatively, to the American Government. “After 26 months of mismanagement,” this authority told the New Orleans Association of Commerce, “the Government surrendered the rails with a heritage of four or five billions of dollars saddled on to the country, flippantly alleged to fairly represent a legitimate war cost, although much of it was in-' excusable, avoidable waste; a scale ol operating expenses £3,000,000,000 dollars more than in 1917, and so burden-, some as to make it cost almost 100 cents to earn each dollar of gross revenue. . . . In 1917 the railroads had 264,652 shop men; in March, 1920, 378,238, an increase of 113,652 or 43 per cent.” Other testimony cqn be only indicated. , ■' “In the main,” said Honourable F. B. Kellogg, “the j>resent deplorable condition of the railroads is due to tlxe inefficient and extravagant Government management and stupid bureaucratic control.” “As a result of a year’s study of this problem,” declared Hon. Atlec Pomerene, “I say there has ■ never been in the history of the railroads of this country as much extravagance and inefficiency a 3 there has been under this unified coqtrol.” And so on and so on to the length of weary iteration. A FAIR FIELD. It must not be assumed that these allusions to the railway conditions in America during 1917 and are intended to imply that the conditions ol the State railways in New Zealand are in peril of reaching a similar condition. It is true that away back in the early eighties there were members of Parliament urging that the New Zealand railways should be sold in order to relieve the colony—as the Dominion then was—of its accumulating debts; but through all the years there has been, no suggestion that any one of the succeeding Governments has done less than its best to secure satiffactory results from the lines. It remains, however, for the Government, whatever its title or its colour may be, to see that the'railways of the Dominion are placed upon a sound business basis, and that all their . subsidiary undertakings ' are justified by results or promptly scrapped. There is no sound reason why the taxpayers should be maintaining steamers to carry holiday makers to tourist resorts, or why they should be providing the means for running • State sawmills at a loss. Theso are items belonging to a class of subjects which rarely receive the attention they should from Parliament and on that account should have the closest scrutiny from the Government of the day. “THE NEW DESPOTISM.” Under thi3 heading Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice of England, has lately published a book in which ho points out that public departments at Home have assumed the powers of Parliament, and the duties of the Law Courts. “They have,” it is

put bluntly by a distinguished commentator, “taken out to make regular tions which have the force of statutes and to oust the jurisdiction of the judges at their pleasure.” This sweeping statement has a direct bearing upon-, the various matters just indicated here. The Board of Trade Act, still on the New Zealand Statute Book, gives the departments here even greater mandatory authority than do the regulations in the Mother Country mentioned by the Lord Chief Justice. And yet an apathetic public in • the Dominion is content to leave the Board of Trade Act on the Statute Book to be put into operation by any Government that wishes to get its own way without the authority of either Parliament or people. “The judges are deliberately pushed ' aside,” says the Daily Telegraph, in commenting upon the English Act. “The department is -not to be challenged. It gives no reasons. It never explains. It frequently will not even hear the other side.” In New Zealand, the judges and the other side are given no standing at all. Tire department is supreme.