NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4894, 25 September 1901, Page 2

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

In our issue of the 11th instant a letter

appeared from a old age pensions, correspondent commenting on the abuses which are generally believed to exist with reference to the receipt of old age pensions. Our correspondent appears to be of opinion tbat, as regards recipients of tbe pensions in the Tuapeka district, the publication in our columns of tbe names of recipients would have the effect of checking or restricting imposition. Were this done, he thinkß, those who are not entitled to the pension, assuming there are such persons, would scarcely have the bold- < ness to apply for the pension, as if they did the public ffould know and matters would soon be righted. We strongly doubt this. Oar experience, based on observation, is that the remedy he suggests would not exercise the slightest deterrent effect on the shameless and coarse-grained persons who at present are fraudulently in possession of tbe pension. On the other hand, we believe it would, in many cases, have ihe effect of preventing those of finer or more sensitive feelings from coming forward to claim what was theirs by right of law. Indeed we can recall at this moment a number of such cases, among them being not a few old miners who had fallen on evil days through misfortune or ill-health rather than from improvidence or idleness. Men of the i same class have been known in the district to perish in their huts rather than apply for charitable aid and to the same men the Benevolent Institution bud terrors akin to those of perdition. It is all very well for those who are not compelled co make public appeal for relief — for after all it is regarded as a form of relicf — to aay that the pension carried no stigma with it. Certainly ib does nob or, at least, ought not. Nor should charitable aid. But yet admittedly it does, and the difficulty with some people, wit>u many people, indeed, with the public at large, no matter what jargon may be talked to the contrary, is to disassociate one from the other. Besides, there is still a very large class of people who, though their poverty may be plain to every eye, still caanot bring themselves, even at the recompense of alleviating it, to make public proclamation of it to the world, and we do not see what right a newspaper has, anymore than any individual in tbe streets, to subject them to gratuitous pain by ticketing their poverty at bo much per week and bawling out their names from the housetops. If , as has been freely alleged, the pension is not a charifcANOTHER view OF able gift bub a the matter. right, founded on citizenship and assumed service to the State, then on what grounds can the privilege be claimed to make public use of the name of the recipient? If there are, as is very generally believed, counterfeits and impostors among the recipients of old age pensions eitner in this district or elsewhere it is the duty of the Government to see that the requisite means are taken for their detection and punishment. But, as it should be the duty of the State as far as possible to make crime impossible, then the machinery of the Old Age Pensions Act should be so enlarged and perfected as to provide, In the first place, for the most exhaustive inquiries by special officers into the means of every applicant for the pension as well as for a continuance of the most vigilant supervision and inquiry in the same direction and, in case of fraud being proved, the infliction of each a punish meat as would effectively deter othero from attempting a similar imposition. And all this could be done without such harassing espionage as might amount to anything like persecution , At present very little, indeed, is done to check the rampant fraud and deceit to which the possession of the pension has iucited so many people. It is j quite bad enough, we were going to say, 1 that it tends to extinguish tbe sense of filial obligation in the colony, bub that is impossible as that quality never existed to any extent in New Zealand. In tbat respect it can have done little harm and there can be no doubt that it bas brightened the lives and made the de* dining years of thousands of old people j happy, It is further certain that the time is near at hand when the country will demand an administration of tbe pension under such conditions as will make participation in it by people ie easy or well-to-do circumstances impossible.