THE PUBLIC SERVICE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21579, 26 February 1932, Page 6

THE PUBLIC SERVICE.

It would plainly be perfectly idle for public servants to imagine that they might be, or should be, exempt from the effect of the conditions that have necessitated right throughout New Zealand, in every class of industry, the practice of retrenchment by reductions in the number of hands employed and reductions in the salaries and wages of those retaining their positions. The brief report, which we publish elsewhere, of an interview yesterday between the Prime Minister and a deputation from all sections of the public service does not indicate the precise nature of the representations that were addressed to the Government. Reading between the lines, however, we infer that they embraced the proposals which, as was shown in a message that appeared in yesterdays issue, the executives of the service organisations in the Post and Telegraph and Railways Departments have submitted to the Economy Commission. They are proposals for the adoption of a policy of inflation. As such, they must be held to be fundamentally unsound and calculated to bring in their train evils certainly not less serious than those, admittedly grave, with which the Dominion is already confronted. Mr Forbes clearly appreciated this when he implied that the adoption by the Government of this “constructive alternative,” as it was quaintly called by the deputation, to a policy of retrenchment in the public service, would lead simply to “further disaster.” There is, in fact, no escape from the logic of the position as it was stated by Mr Forbes. There must be additional wage reductions in the public service or there must be wholesale dismissals. That there will have to be dismissals seems certain, and probably there must be. dismissals on an extensive scale, but if a reduction of wages is presented as an alternative to wholesale dismissals it is surely in the interests of the members of the public service as a whole that they should acquiesce unhesitatingly in the reduction. After all, there is no Fortunatus’s purse from which the salaries and wages of members of the public service are paid. The fund out of which the cost of the public service is met is wholly provided by the people of the Dominion in the form of taxes and of payments for services rendered by the State,, and the serious diminution in the amount of revenue obtained by the Government, reflecting the diminution in the income of the taxpayers, leaves the Government with no choice with regard to its expenditure.