The Press Monday, November 14, 1927. Encroaching Bureaucracy.
The heading of this article is very familiar to our readers. We print today some extracts from a leading article in The Times which has the same heading, and some extracts from an address delivered to the American Bar Association by Lord Hewart, Lord Chief Justice of England. There is perhaps little in either The Times's editorial or in Lord Hewart's address that readers of The Press will not remember to have met with in our own columns at frequent intervals for years past. It is an interesting fact, however, that The Times introduces Lord Hewart's attack on what we have called • ; the tyranny of the officials" as something new and striking. This means only that the people of the United Kingdom are in the first stage of realising that their ordinary liberties have been drifting out of the hands of Parliament and traditional Law into the bands of Departmental officials equipped with powers that over-rule all the common resources of the citizen seeking liberty and justice. The grievance of the people of Great Britain is ridiculously small in comparison with the grievance of the citizens of New Zealand. The bureaucrats are the same in spirit and intention everywhere, but in Great Britain the area of State action Is, by New Zealand standards, very small indeed. Yet Lord Hewart feels it necessary to use language concerning the bureaucratic danger in Great Britain which The Press has been ridiculed or abused for bringing into its warnings about a far greater danger of the same kind in this Dominion. Of late there have been signs that the tyranny of the officials is being understood in New Zealand. Even Radicals and Socialists amongst the politicians, and amongst the newspapers, are beginning to say what we have been saying for decades about government by Order-in-Council, about Parliament's delegation of its authority to regula-tion-making Departments, about the preservation for unfair or blundering officials of "the prerogative of the '•' Crown." But the fact that our numberless protests against the gradual enslavement of the people by our oversown Public Service have had practically no support until very lately makes us doubt whether the rot can be stayed very quickly or very easily. We know that in official and Ministerial circles opposition to the growth of the bureaucratic tendency has been regarded as The Press's private and harmless crotchet. Since the holding of the conference of Chambers of Commerce, at which the encroachment of the officials was strongly and plainly condemned, the Government and Parliament may have begun to realise that it has not been a crotchet at all, and that responsible men are beginning to : rebel against officialism. The address of Lord Hewart, and the support given to his views by The Times —and also by so Eadical an organ as the London Star —may, and one hopes will, make | Parliament and the Government give ; serious and anxious thought to as < grave an evil as ever threatened a ] modern State. ]
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Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19157, 14 November 1927, Page 8
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501The Press Monday, November 14, 1927. Encroaching Bureaucracy. Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19157, 14 November 1927, Page 8
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