HARD AND FAST RULES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 276, 16 July 1932, Page 4

HARD AND FAST RULES

As the Mayor, Mr. T. Jackson, pointed out at this week's meeting of the Rotorua Borough Council, there is a lack of elasticity in the regulations of the Unemployment Board, governing the cultivation of gardens by relief workers. The Board has rightly taken the view that the taxpayer should not be called upon to help men who show no reasonable inclination to help themselves, and has laid it down as a definite rule that married men who are in a position to do so, and who have made no endeavour to subsidise their earnings by garden cultivation, are to be debarred from employment under the 5A scheme. In its conception, this regulation is justified, but as Mr. Jackson pointed out, it would lw unjust to apply it as a hard and fast rule. Yery many married relief workers are living in houses where they have no security of tenure and where the conditions are entirely unfavourahle to garden cultivation. Obviously it would be imposing un justified hardship upon these men to apply to them the absolute letter of the Board's regulation. This however, is apparently the intention of the Commissioner for Unemployment, who has sent out circular letters, enjoining all unemployment committees strictly to enforce the previous instructions in this connection. In order to provide the elasticity which the Board has apparently considered unnecessary, the council has decided to make certain unused borough land available to men who have no security of tenure in their own tenaneies, and who will by this means, be able reasonably to fulfil the somewhat arbitrary requirements of the Unemployment Board. Both the Rotorua Borough Council and the Rotorua Unemployment Committee have done a great deal to alleviate the position of the unemployed men in this town and district, and for this they deserve credit. Throughout the country, similar local bodies and associations of private citizens have given their willing assistance in meeting the complexities of the unemployment administration, and for many of them it has been a thankless ta.sk. In this action on the part of the Rotorua Borough Council, we have a further example of the extent to which the stodginess of departmental regulations require the leavening of a more sympathetic understanding. We do not suggest that the Government is entirely lacking in an appreciation of the assistance which it is receiving from private individuals in this directon, for on various occasions the Prime Minister and the Minister for Employment have publicly acknowledged this assistance, but we do suggest that this public appreciation might be more convincingly demonstrated by a greater measure of co-operation on the part of the authorities. The departmental mind has been very evident in the administration of jthe Unemployment Act, and committees and local bodies hav'e been subjected to many irritations and pinprickings in endeavouring to reconcile this attitude with their own local conditions. This latest fiat on the subject of garden cultivation is a case in point. The general principle of encouraging the men to help themselves by growing garden produce is entirely sound, but, while some measure of compulsion is admittedly necessary in a number of cases, hard and fast rules will prove only an irritation, and are likely to militate against the success of the scheme. These small instances serve only to emphasise the genera proposition that business in government is often noticeably facilitated when it is not entirely government in administration.