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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 7644, 22 May 1886, Page 4

A question of considerable importance was raised in the House yesterday by Captain Sutter, as to whether the chairmanship of any standing committee should be a paid or an honorary office. In the usual course the Hon. the Native Minister moved for the appointment of a Committee on Native Affairs, and Captain Sutter took occasion to move as an amendment that the position of chairman of the said committee be considered an honorary appointment. The general principle of attaching a salary to such appointments was thus challenged, and a general debate on the subject took place. As in point of form the question related to finance, it was ultimately agreed that it would be more in order to discuss it when the Estimates were before the House, and on this understanding the amendment was withdrawn. Captain Sutter has, however, rendered good service to the House and the country by his seizing the earliest opportunity of calling the attention of the House to the fact that on the score both of economy and of political purity the system of salarying the chairmen of these committees should be put an end to. The latter of the two indictments thu3 preferred against the practice is unquestionably the more severe one. The matter of four or five hundred pounds is in one sense not a great sum to fight over. Yet even that amount, in these days of imperative retrenchment, is a considerable saving, especially when it is recollected that the hereditary tendency is always to increase political salaries, never to diminish them. The economic view of the matter, therefore, must not be lost sight of or be underrated, simply because it is the multiplicity of these comparatively small but perpetually augmenting items of expenditure that largely swells the public burdens. Still, it is the moral rather than the economical aspect of the question that most loudly calls for attention and resistance. There is a perpetual danger of these appointments becoming a thinly disguised form' of political bribery ; and that the danger has been actually realised under the present Ministry is an indisputable fact. Last session they contrived to get rid ot one chairman who declined to receive salary, and generally to have all the appointments to the office of chairmanship conferred upon their own supporters. And this, in conjunction with the salary which in every case they attached to the office, really secured for them the command of all the committees. To a system like this, bribery and corruption are the only terms that can honestly be applied. The sooner, therefore, it is struck on the head, the better will it be for the purity and independence of Parliament and the lightening of the taxpayers' burdens ; and, when the Estimates come to be dealt with, the House ought most mercilessly to sweep away this abuse.