"IN COMMITTEE."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20807, 25 February 1931, Page 10

"IN COMMITTEE."

Deciding to go into committee for the reconsideration of arrangements necessitated by the medical superintendent's leave of absence, the Hospital Board was possibly justified; but it must be said that local bodies are too much given to transacting public business in private. To go into committee is a useful device for allowing greater freedom of discussion : it permits, as a method of procedure, a liberty of speech, particularly as to the number of times a speaker may traverse, the motion under discussion, that is not possible in the formal debates of an ordinary session. This legitimate use of the method, however, is not usually meant by a proposal to go into committee: the purpose is to ensure absolute privacy. This purpose, which is preferably expressed by a resolution to discuss a particular subject "in camera" rather than "in committee," is occasionally unexceptionable. There arise, at times, matters whose public airing can serve no good end and may do positive and unnecessary harm. To concede this is nevertheless a very different thing from accepting as generally justifiable the private discussion of public business. The whole of the work of local bodies, after all, is of public interest, or should be; and resort to privacy ought to be very sparingly used by them. It may bo argued that, having elected certain persons to care for its interests and manage its business, the public should unprotestinglv allow them to do it, at their discretion, in private. The argument proves too much: it suggests that, if they so desire, these persons may elect to do all their work behind closed doors, and that would be intolerable. There is an undoubted tendency to turn a resource meant for rare use into a refuge from public oversight at almost every awkward turn. The Hospital Board is not the only offender in this way, yet time and again it lias taken wholly in private certain matters of business that should have been discussed in the open. Items of its building programme. for instance, have been so taken. Public bodies cannot reasonably complain if frequent resort to this practice engenders suspicion; they have courted it by turning an exception into a rule.