The Press Saturday, November 22, 1924. The Public Trust Office.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18237, 22 November 1924, Page 12

The Press Saturday, November 22, 1924. The Public Trust Office.

Amongst the criticisms of the Public Trust Office which we printed yesterday there was a letter from a correspondent, writing in a northern paper, who, in tho course of his criticisms, says that there is a "strong current "of opinion setting in against the "Public Trust Office." That this is true we have the strongest evidence for believing. Since we commenced tho publication of our articles dealing with the Office we have been overwhelmed with enquiries for copies of tho issues containing them, and theße enquiries have come from all parts of New Zealand. We have received also a considerable number of letters from clients of the Office complaining of what they regard as unfair and inconsiderate treatment, but we have preferred not to print individual complaints, since our purpose has been the exposure of the unsound principles upon which the present-day policy and methods of tho Office are based. We should not have undertaken this work had we not been persuaded that the I Public Trust Office has now a charac- j ter and purpose very different from | what Parliament intended when establishing it, and has armed itself, through the' ignoranee and apathy of our legislators, with powers and privileges offensive to justice and injurious from the point of view of public policy. In one of our earlier articles we said that beneficiaries are skinned, the taxpayer is scalped, private trustees are unfairly oppressed, and the public interest in keeping the public services within bounds is ignored. For each of these charge.B there is abundant justification in the articles of the Rev. Father Bowling and our other contributor "Jurist," and although a reply was issued by the Public Trustee to a pstrt of the criticism directed ! against hia Office, that reply was oil the face of it quite unsatisfactory. Althpugh not a little correspondence on the subject has appeared in other newspapers, none of the leading journals except the "Otago Daily Times" and Auckland "Star" have ventured to support the attitude of "The "Press," which is the attitude' of most of those who have taken the trouble to study the curious development of the Office. This coyness ia rather surprising in newspapers which are ready to overbrim at any time concerning other State Departments which present no problems comparable in seriousness with those presented by the bureaucratic bank which the Trust Office haß become. It is not as if anyone were attacking the principle of a genuine Public Trust, making silence the pait of those who support that principle. The Auckland "Star," from which wo reprint an editorial that it prilnted on Wednesday last, is a sturdily democratic and even Radical journal, and it recognises that tho case made against the Office is one which ought to be answered.