SYDNEY CRITICISM

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 196, 17 May 1944, Page 6

SYDNEY CRITICISM

Growing Total Of Wartime Regulations

(By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. (Special Australian Correspondent.)

(Received May 16, 7.5 p.m.) SYDNEY, May 16. Growing bureaucratic control and the mounting total of the Federal Government’s wartime regulations are being trenchantly criticized. Since the war began. says the Sydney “Daily Telegraph,” the Commonwealth Government has passed 8090 regulations and orders to organize the community—an average of nearly five a day, including Sundays. In this time, some 150 boards and committees have -been created to administer the regulations and the number of Commonwealth public servants has increased from 48,000 to 88,000—50,000 of them being temporary workers. The 88,000 does not include many thousands of Government employees not controlled by the Public Service Board. Professor A. K. Stout, Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at Sydney University, declared that the despotism of Government officials ruling by regulation was an ever-growing menace to democratic liberties. Powers easily conferred by regulation grew like a rolling snowball. Professor John Anderson, Professor of .Philosophy at Sydney University, said: “Once powers are delegated by Parliament, arbitrary control of the population begins. Legislators must be directly responsible to the people and, their actions continually open to publie and parliamentary criticism.” Mr. D. Maughan, K.C., president of the Law Council of Australia, said that government by regulation should be completely abolished in peacetime. War conditions made government by regulation necessary, but did not give an overriding right to Government departments to issue regulations wholesale where no emergency existed.