THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, August 31, 1938. BUREAUCRACY'S NET

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23592, 31 August 1938, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, August 31, 1938. BUREAUCRACY'S NET

A moment's thought should suffice to impress the truth of the statement made by Mr Will Appleton, during his address to National Party supporters on Monday evening, that hardly anyone can to-day escape the bureaucratic control which has become a conspicuous feature of government during less than three years of applied Socialism in New Zealand. Since the Labour Party took office in 1935 the net of an unyielding officialism has been so widened as to enmesh almost every form of privatelyoperated business. Examples, indeed, might be taken at random. In the sphere of transport there is the spectacle of a Minister whose powers of control are virtually unlimited. He is the final arbiter in any dispute that may arise out of a question of transport licensing. He can say that a particular district has a sufficiency of transport facilities, and that no more shall be permitted; he can employ his powers to order the transfer of a private licence to the State; and he can use his veto to prevent any extension of private competition with State-operated services. He is in a position to secure for the State an absolute monopoly of all transport business. Whereas railway policy was formerly determined by an independent and nonpolitical board, the Minister is now the sole directing authority. In the control of the broadcasting services a similar position obtains: there is no appeal that can go beyond the jurisdiction of the Minister in charge. Industry is as arbitrarily bound to accept the dictates of departmental authority, with the result indicated by Mr Appleton, that it now finds itself plagued by a host of new regulations, plans, commissions, quotas and other official discouragements to the free play of enterprise. Almost the entire field of production and marketing is now surveyed by the State from the vantage point of bureaucratic privilege. The producer for export is compelled, to a large extent, to sell to the Government, which itself markets his produce; and the machinery of control is being gradually extended to embrace the internal market as well. The owner of a business may count himself fortunate if he can dispose of it to another operator without an all-seeing bureaucracy obtruding itself into the transaction —perhaps to permit it as contemplated by the parties, perhaps to modify the proposals made, or perhaps, and not uncommonly, to forbid the deal out of hand. Scarcely a week passes without the production of fresh evidence of the rigours of departmental rule, denoting steady if unobtrusive progress toward the Government's goal of the socialisation of all the means of production, distribution and exchange. Nor is the employee immune from State influences aimed at the curtailment of individual liberty, for the undemocratic principle of compulsory unionism binds him wherever his work is subject to award conditions. People in every walk of life are finding their activi-

ties more and more circumscribed by rules and regulations designed, it may be assumed, to herald the approach of the Socialist millennium. If it is Socialism that is desired by the people of the Dominion, as Professor Algie has commented, it is only right that it should come. It will assuredly not be sought, however, as a political system, if those who are apt loosely to bespeak it take the time to examine even those few of its implications that were noted by Mr Appleton.