Bureaucracy.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20093, 24 November 1930, Page 10

Bureaucracy.

An editorial in the latest issue of the Public Service Journal takes the Hon. J. A. Hanan severely to task for daring to criticise bureaucracy in New Zealand and to advocate decentralisation as a means of reducing the taxation piled up by the. present system of administration. " A bureaucratic sys- " tem of government," Mr Hanan said, in the Legislative Council, " is being " built up, and to some extent it is ". the bureaucrats who arc imposing " taxation on the people in order to " maintain their multiplicity of De- " partments and keep their huge staffs " in employment. . . . It is no exag- " geration to say that the civil servants " govern this country." Agreeing that a " bureaucratic" is a centralised sj stem of control, the Joumal leaves the real issue aside in order to describe the organisation of the Public Service of the Dominion, and arrives at the satisfying—or self-satisfied— conclusion that '• the people of this country " have every reason to be thankful that "the civil servants are honest and " conscientious men who carry out their duties faithfully and regardless of the political creed of the Party in power." It does not occur to the Journal, apparently, that honesty and conscientiousness are virtues which the country is entitled to assume in its servants, as the foundation of their service. These virtues are not questioned, and they ought not to be bonsted. It is absurd, when the complaint i:; made that there are too many public servants? and that they cost too much and that the system the} operate in in , many ways too rigid and restrictive and obstructive, to reply that they are honest and industrious men. They are paid to be honest and industrious, and arc

given an uncommon security and nn-r-mmon privileges as well; but more demands are rightly inade on the system than that it should be run by honest and industrious men. If the public is dissatisfied with the system —and it is dissatisfied, and on more grounds than out —then it is fully entitled to say so, or to agree with public men who express dissatisfaction, as Mr Hanan does; and when the Public Service Journal retorts with testimony to the honour of the Service the public can only feel impatient. More than this, it must feel that the irrelevance of the retort is strong evidence that the criticism is just. It is the habit of bureaucracy to miss the point of objections against bureaucracy. The Public Service in too numerous, 100 expensive, too arrogant, and too influential. This is the simple truth, and it should be uttered and reform should be demanded, whet' er the truth and the demand arc agreeable to the Service or not.