STATE INTERFERENCE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18540, 10 April 1930, Page 7

STATE INTERFERENCE

MATTER OF NATIONAL CONCERN. At a gathering of members of the New Zealand Dental Association, held in Auckland recently, allusions were made to the growing tendency of the Government, through its various departments, to obtrude upon the spheres of professional men. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects and others, it was said, were faced with opposition from the State which was justified neither by the needs of the public nor by the shortcomings of the professions. The doctors and dentists had no objection to the State watching as closely as it pleased the medical and dental needs of children in the public schools or of children and adults in other public institutions of the kind. They did not mind doing a great deal of gratuitous work themselves—that was the lot of their professions—but they did protest against the State taking out of their hands practice for which they had qualified by long years of study and labour, and handing it over to officials, who might or might not be as well qualified, and who, in any case, would be a charge upon the taxpayers.

About the same time as the doctors and dentists were making their protests in Auckland, the fruitgrowers in the Nelson district were laying their grievances against an ineffective system* of “control” before the Minister of Agriculture. Mr McKee, their spokesman, told the Hon. G. W. Forbes that the handling of the growers’ fruit in Wellington last year had cost the growers £50,000 as a result of delay “for which control in Wellington was responsible.” The growers, it seems, did not suggest the abolition of control, but they wanted a strong, capable organisation that would be really representative of their interests. Here is another protest against Government interference with pi’ivate enterprise, even when the intrusion is wrapped up in the guise of industrial co-operation. Other examples of the results of State meddling with private enterprise may be gathered from the Railway Statement for the last financial year. The Wakatipu steamers showed a loss of £6,484; the departmental dwellings a loss of £65,176; the road motor service a loss of £5,879, and the railway sawmills and bush a loss of £22,057 —a total of £98,596, against which refreshment rooms, bookstalls, advertising, and some odds and ends, returned only £21.226, leaving a net loss of £77,370.

Mention of railways recalls the story told by a prominent “captain of industry” of what befell the United States lines when, at the beginning of the last year of the Great War, they were handed over, tentatively, to the American Government. “After twenty-six months of mismanagement,” this authority told the New Orleans Association of Commerce,

“the Government surrended the rails with a heritage of four or five billions of dollars saddled on to the country, flippantly alleged to fairly represent a legitimate war cost, although much of it was inexcusable, avoidable waste; a scale of operating expenses 3,000,000,000 dollars more than in 1917, and so burdensome as to make it cost almost 100 cents to earn each dollar of gross revenue. ... In 1917 the railroads had 264,652 shop men; in March, 1920, 378,238, an increase of 113,652 or 43 per cent.” Other testimony can be only indicated. “In the main,” said the Hon. F. B. Kellogg, “the present deplorable condition of the railroads is due to the inefficient and extravagant Government management and stupid bureaucratic control.” “As a result of a year’s study of this problem,” declared the Hon. Atlec Pomrene, “I say there has never been in the history of the railroads of this country as much extravagance and

inefficiency as there has been under this unified control.” And so on, and so on, to the length of weary iteration. It must not be assumed that these allusions to the railway conditions in America during 1917 and 1918 are intended to imply that the conditions of the State railways in New Zealand are in peril of reaching a similar condition. It is true that away back in the early eighties there were members of Parliament urging that the New Zealand railways should be sold in order to relieve the colony—as the Dominion then was—of its accumulating debts; but through all the years, there has been no suggestion that any one of the succeeding Governments j has done less than its best to secure . satisfactory results from the lines. It remains, however, for the Govern- j ment, whatever its title or its colour » may be, to see that the railways of I the Dominion are placed upon a sound j business basis, and that all their subsidiary undertakings are justified by results or promptly scrapped. There is no sound reason why the taxpayers should be maintaining steamers to carry holiday-makers to tourist resorts, or why they should be providing the means for running State sawmills at a loss. These are items belonging to a class of subjects which rarely receive the attention they should from Parliament, and on that account should have the closest scrut- . iny from the Government of the day. , The Lord Chief Justice of England, has lately published a book in which he points out that public departments at Home have assumed the powers of Parliament and the duties of the Law Courts. “They have,” it is put bluntly | by a distinguished commentator, j “taken power to make regulations | which have the force of statutes, and to oust the jurisdiction of ] the judges at their pleasure.” This | sweeping statement has a direct bearing upon the various matt.ers just in- I dicated here. The Board of Trade Act, j still on the New Zealand Statute i Book, gives the departments here even greater mandatory authority than do the regulations in the Mother Country mentioned by the Lord Chief Justice. And yet an apathetic public in the Dominion is content to leave the Board of Trade Act on the Statute Book to be put into operation by any Government that wishes to get its own way without the authority of either Parliament or people. “The judges are deliberately pushed aside,” says the j “Daily Telegraph” in commenting j upon the English Act. “The depart- j ment is not to be challenged. It gives j no reasons. It never explains. It fre- . quently will not even hear the other ; side.” In New Zealand the judges and J the other side are given no standing , at all. The department is supreme. I (Contributed by Associated Chambers of Commerce.)