NEW SOCIETY FORMED

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 119, 19 April 1934, Page 2

NEW SOCIETY FORMED

PUBLIC_ SERVICE ADMINISTRATION. Per Press Association. CHRISTCHURCH, April 18. To give members of the Civil Service an insight into the work of public administration, a new society, the Public Service Administration Society, has been formed at Christchurch. The society, working in collaboration with the authorities of Canterbury College, has organised a series of lectures for the winter term, in which all phases of the organisation of the modern State will be dealt with. The society has been formed chiefly for the benefit of the younger controlling officers of the service, the object being to give them an insight into the wide ramifications of tho administration of a State organised on modern lines. Mr C. G. S. Ellis, president of the new society, remarked to-day that it had been felt for some time that training beyond that given by an ordinary university degree course was necessary for those members of the service who would ultimately hold a controlling position in it. At present officers of the Public Service were trained accountants, trained bookkeepers, trained surveyors, or trained lawyers, but they were not trained as administrators, and only gained their administrative knowledge by experience in their own particular spheres. Public administration of the modern State, however, was so complex that it was felt that some special training on a more general basis was desirable, and the society had been formed with this object in view. It was really a group formed to study the broad subject of public administration and its application to various State departments. The Christchurch society is the first of its kind in New Zealand, but it is anticipated that it will be rapidly extended to other centres. It has the support of the Public Service Commissioner, and it is hoped that eventually it will receive the official support of the University of New Zealand, and that a diploma in public administration will be instituted. - Since the work which the society is setting out to do is aimed chiefly at improving tho capabilities of the section of the service likely to become controlling offioers, membership of the society is being restricted more or less closely to the professional and clerical divisions. At present the membership is between 40 and 50, but it is pioable that this will increase once the society’s activities begin. A course of 10 lectures has been arranged by the Canterbury College authorities for the coming term.