CIVIL SERVICE CONTROL

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21855, 18 July 1934, Page 12

CIVIL SERVICE CONTROL

POWERS OF COMMISSIONER CHANGE IN SYSTEM URGED [by telegraph—owx correspondent] WELLINGTON. Tuesday "1 if el that the time has come to take careful stock of the position and to consider if the interests of the Civil Service would not be better safeguarded by a board of three commissioners, or by a system where at any rate the. assistant-commissioners could not be dismissed, except on the same terms as the commissioner himself, namely, by resolution of the House of Representatives on definite charges of incompetence and misbehaviour,' 1 said Dr. Campbell Begg, president of tho New Zealand Legion, when referring to the power vested in the Public Service Commissioner during an address to the "Wellington branch of the Insurance Institute and Officers' Guild to-night. Dr. Begg said that wherever the Public Service had found itself at the mercy of political change, graft of the worst kind had set in. There was no doubt that the Public Service in New Zealand had been used as a stamping ground for politics in the past. While the commissioner himself could be removed only by resolution of the House of Representatives, the assistantcommissioners could be removed by the Executive on the recommendation of the commissioner himself, who had practically sole power. "The dangers of such a positing are apparent," said Dr. Begg, "and it may not be desirable that the morale of the service should be affected by the feeling that the whole of tho destiny oi members is vested in one man."