Page 10 Advertisements Column 3

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19551, 6 August 1925, Page 10

“In the 1921 departmental report appeared a most unfortunate paragraph which impugned the loyalty of certain officers (unnamed) to the department,’’ stated Mr H. E. Combs, in his address at the opening of tho P. and T. Conference in Wellington. “It was one of those vague unfair attacks which are so difficult to meet. If it were aimed in any way at the prominent officials of tho association, I wish to ray, from a very wide experience, that I have never known any elected official with whom I have been in contact to suggest, much less assort, that any attempt should bo made to do anything that would impair the efficiency of tho service the department renders tho public. If the paragraph had reference to the definite and proper stand taken by association officials in the interests of the members who elected them, then one can only deplore tho standard of fair play which lay behind its insertion in a parliamentary paper. Tho paragraph was seized on by the press (I was in one town in which the local nowspaper dismissed the full report in a few lines and published this paragraph word for word), and certainly gave a wrong impression of the service. The paragraph was the subject of a lengthy am] animated discussion in Parliament; but as this was duly reported in the Katipo no further reference is required Kons.”