‘No merger decided’

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 8

‘No merger decided’

PA Wellington The Government had not made a decision on the plan to merge the Lands and Survey Department and the Forest Service, said the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, yesterday. “We have not made a decision and we won’t for a couple of weeks,” he told a post-Cabinet press conference. Mr Muldoon was responding to reports that the merger plans would be abandoned. Wellington’s “Evening Post” quoted the Minister of

Lands and Forests, Mr Elworthy, as saying his merger plans had been defeated by the high cost involved. He had accused bureaucrats advising him on the viability of the merger of inflating the estimated costs to help defeat the plan. Commenting on the newspaper report, the Joint Campaign on Native Forests said that it was good to see that Mr Elworthy had retreated from his “hasty and ill-conceived” merger plan.

The campaign’s director, Mr Guy Salmon, said it was faulty thinking to attempt to create a structure under which both native and exotic timber forests could be managed together, when the management objectives for each were quite different.

If the Government desired to put the management of radiata pine plantations on to a more commercial basis, this should be done by means of a corporation structure like the Railways Corporation, Mr Salmon said.