GOVERNMENT AS A BUSINESS

Hokitika Guardian, 13 July 1931, Page 8

GOVERNMENT AS A BUSINESS

(Sydney Bulletin.)

The business of government is the biggest in Australia. It employs '21.%. UUU people, and charges the public tor the services it renders. them, over £1b0,000,000 a year—about 30 per cent, of the national ineomJe in normal times; close on 45 per cent in a period of depression. In return tor this money it runs the railways and some of the trams, the post office, the police and the law courts, the lighthouses, the schools, the army and navy. It pays pensions, and struggles to pay the interest on its mulituindous and enormous loans. Activities outside these do not arouse a flicker of enthusiasm in any save a few.

The most expensive item on the list is interest, well over £00,000,000 a yea" —a very stiff bill to face after 40 years of colinisation, and not pleasanter t > look at because so much of the money was wasted. Close on £30,000,000 a year is paid for pensions, maternity allowances and such like benevolences, swollen in these hard times by probably another six or seven millions for unemployment doles. In addition to that again there is a steady £10,000,000 a year for “hospitals and other charitable institutions” though most of these are perpetually begging cn their account. One way and another Government benevolences thus mop up close oil £50,000,000 of our earnings—which is a lot more than a nation suffering a financial crisis can afford. Education or such part of it ns Government provides for, cost sus about 11) million a year. How much of it is good value for the money is a matter upon which practical people begin to have gravt doubts. . The police and the court use £5,703,000 a year. They are a necessity The Customs house costs £.1,0'.0,000 out of which tiie lighthouse service is provided. Railways and trams cost us £0,000.000 a year, a los which'implies thate eithe there have been nppaling errors of construction or there is appalling wase in operation.

lotting up these items, hardly, one of which can be passed without grave doubts about mis-spemling, it will be discovered that they leave about £OO,001),COO unaccounted for. This margin can be lumped under the heading of

I 'triinm ings and the cost ol collecting taxes.’ Glider efficient and ruthless management it could be reduced hv one half. '

"Why have we not got this ruthless and efficient management 7 The pri mary reason is timet you can’t get efficiency without proper training and ex perience. If you require of your professional politicians no more than a c; pa city for public oratory, it will be only very occasionally, and by great good .luck, that you will get more. If government, in the main, is flabby and meet the faul he has with the people who created it, tolerated it; even encouraged its worst weakness. Make a list of the 20 most efficient business administators in Australia, and it is doubtful whether half a dozen of them Could win ail open seat in any Austral ian popular Chamber. Certainly you could pick up a score of men who have never been able to command a decent administrative job in their lives who could beat tlieotlier 20 hollow —that is to say, for seats which hadn’t been won won and lost before the campaign started. The fact that so many seats are won and lost before the eampain starts is even a worse feature of our political life; for it shows that reason ha sheen dethroned and the rule of the mob or the machine substituted. One point we shall have to decide before long is whether every man and woman is entitled to the vote simply because they are man and woman. Be fore we allow a man to go to the jury bov ‘to decide issues of utter unimport mice compared with those which the people’s elected may handle, we submite him to a species of preliminary examination ; and even then it is open to either side to reject him. When it comes to deciding for or against politi cal, candidates, we ask no more than that the citizens should not be a oerti fied lunatic. As to his knowledge of the problems involved, ns to his mental capacity to. grasp them, we trouble not at all. Indeed, we know well that lnmd’-eds of thousands of citizens have neither the ennacitv nor the knowledge but we are perfectly content so long as we can buy their votes. ■'ml wo continue this system in the name of democracy.