Wool Is Down, So Salaries Go Up

Southland Times, Issue 23378, 9 December 1937, Page 4

Wool Is Down, So Salaries Go Up

The Government has evidently felt the criticism which has been aroused—both inside and outside the House and among its friends as well as its opponents—by the salaries paid to two of its recent appointees, the Director of Internal Marketing and the. Controller of Commercial Broadcasting. Mr C. G. Picot has been made the highest-paid civil servant in the country, though clearly his position is less responsible and less important than a number of others. He receives £2OOO a year. Mr C. G. Scrimgeour, who is in charge of four not very important radio stations and some 300 employees, is paid—for reasons best known to the Government —the same salary (£1500) as the Director of the whole National Broadcasting Service (Professor Shelley) who controls at least four times the number of stations—including all the major ones—and who came to his position after years of scholastic achievement in New Zealand and abroad. Feeling compelled to make an attempt to remedy the anomalies created chiefly by the size of these two salaries, the Government has acted in a characteristic way. Instead of trying to readjust the salaries paid to departmental heads on the basis of their relative responsibility, it has got over the difficulty (or imagines it has) simply by giving a dozen or so of the higher officials salary increases of up to £lOO each. Thus the General Manager of Railways is to receive £l6OO instead of £l5OO, the Director-General of the Post and Telegraph £l5OO instead of £l4OO, and so on. We do not wish to suggest that these officials do. not earn, and deserve, their salaries. Our point is that paying them each £5O or £lOO more a year has done nothing to remove the absurd anomalies on the civil service salary list. Mr Picot is still the highest paid official in the country. The General Manager of Railways, who is in charge of an investment of £60,000,000 of public capital and 20,000 employees, now receives a whole £ 100 a year more than Mr Scrimgeour; but he is still £4OO below Mr Picot. And the Secretary to the Treasury, who more than anybody at the moment must be earning every farthing of his salary, has apparently received no increase at all. He, too, must bow to Mr Picot, by £350 a year. These, incidentally, are some of the general salary increases which have helped to swell the Supplementary Estimates (passed by the House of Representatives early yesterday morning) from the estimate of £300,000 provided for in the Budget to an actual total of £1,613,318. They have coincided with an announcement by the Arbitration Court of its intention to increase wage rates for adult workers. They have also coincided with a fall of up to 40 per cent, in the price of wool and a fall of about 25 per cent, in the price of butter. But who cares about that?