The Obserber.

Observer, Volume 4, Issue 86, 6 May 1882, Page 114

The Obserber.

Saturday, May 7th, 1882

GOVERNMENT BY EOYAL COMMISSION.

The peculiar elasticity of our system of constitutional government is favourable to originality of invention. A Minstry -which cannot, like a showman, keep the public mind dazzled and amused with novelties is soou voted deficient in the faculty of conception and adaptation, and fails to "draw" a majority. The earlier Ministries were constantly developing new and startling sensations in native affairs. The Fox and Stafford administrations played at beggar-iny-neighbour with the waste lands. We are indebted to the Whitaker-Fox Ministry of 1863, for the art of borrowing, which Yogel afterwards perfected. The "Weld (Government gave us responsibility in native affairs. Yogel gave us the railways and public works, the Continuous Ministry centralism, extravagance, log-rolling, and land-sharking ; the G-rey Government, Liberalism, Legislative reforms, and a more equitable distribution of taxation, and it has been reserved for the Hall Ministry to discover a new patent method of Government by Royal Commission. Whenever there was anything unpopular or disagreeable to be done that required firmness, steady application, and delicacy of manipulation, and involved serious responsibility, risk, and labour, the burden was transferred to a Royal Commission 3 whenever the lobbies and back-stair entrances of the Ministerial offices were inconveniently crowded by political supporters, hangers-on, touters, and carpet-baggers, a ready means of deliverance was at hand in the form of appointments to Royal Commissions. In fact while these Commissions have afforded an ingenious method of shirking responsibilities by transferring them in the first instance to Royal Commissions, and ultimately bandying them back upon Parliament, like a game' of shuttlecock, they have been equally useful in opening a way of. evading the Disqualification Act, and providing snug and well-paid billets in reward .for political services. Few people now-a-days feel any real desire for a return to Provincialism in its old form, but if any argument were needed to show; that, in the rough and hasty abolition of the provincial government and local administration, we have fallen into the scarcely less unsatisfactory opposite extreme of insufficient and narrow centralization, that argument is furnished in the continual recourse to itinerant Commissions and costly protracted inquiries into matters of local concern. We have, in fact, an absorptive, restrictive, and mischievously meddlesome Central and supreme government, forming the centre of the system, with an anomalous and nonderscripfc body of sattelites revolving about it in very eccentric and uncertain orbits.

We are' rapidly setting up a peculiar form of executive administration which, not only undermines and threatens to partially destroy the healthy principle of Ministerial responsibility, but opens a wide door for political corruption and extravagance. By permitting a Ministry thus to shift its responsibilities to irresponsible shoulders, — to men who are not amenable to Parliamentary

appointment and removal, and to the only punitive weapon which remains since impeachment has fallen into desuetude, we are assisting to destroy the vital principles and fundamental safe guards in our system of government. Moreover, in the excessive recourse to Eoyal Commissions, we are actually relegating to these irresponsible men, these more place hunters and creatures of the Grovcrnment of the day, not merely the duties of the Ministers, but the very functions of Parliament itself. There will be a .growing tendency in Parliament to adopt the •system which we see at work in some of our local ibodies, to abnegate their own functions of inquiry, investigation, and supervision, and to accept cut and dried recommendations prepared by machinery controlled by the Grovernment with a view to its own interests, but unaccompanied by responsibility for its acts. We shall then have a government of bureauocracies in the worst form. The long struggle of the Stuarts for absolute monarchy resulted in the plan of Ministerial responsibility. Since then, except during the earlier part of the reign of Greorge the Third, when the divisions between the Whigs and Tories, as well as internal differences amongst Whigs themselves, were adroitly turned to account .to the aggrandisement of the Crown, Parliament has been constantly extending the principle of Ministerial responsibility, and rendering more effectual and immediate its method of calling an incompetent or corrupt Ministry to account. The directwant-of-confidence motion — a comparatively modern expedient — marks the last stage in the process. It has been reserved for a New Zealand Ministry out of the depths of a species of Machievelian craft, if not cowardice, to invent a new subterfuge for evading that responsibility, for indefinitely postponing reforms which are demanded by the whole public voice of the country, for purchasing political support, for pensioning dependants by permanent commissions such as that which is represented in the single person of Sir William Fox, for cheating the public by a sham of justice and pretence of activity and industry, and for shirking the duties which essentially belong to an Executive. The public demand reform ; the Gi-overnment meets that demand by the creation of fresh offices and increased expenditure.

Look at the commissions that have sat during the past three years, and are still pursuing their apparently endless Sisyphine labours — commissions on Railways, Judicature, Civil Service, Immigration, Volunteers, Defence, Mines, G-oldlields, •Colonial Industries, Life Insurance, Babbits, Harbours, Vaccination, Public Buildings, G-aols, Hospitals, Charitable Institutions, — in short, every conceivable subject of political and domestic •economy from a new form of constitution to a baby's rattle. And what is the nett result ? Tens ■of thousands of pounds have been squandered in enabling scores of favoured individuals to roam over the Colony, visit the picturesque scenes, such as Waiwera and Rotomahana, live at the best hotels, and qualify themselves for the title of " Political Bogtrotters." Moreover, a great part of the money expended on these Royal Commissions is so manipulated, like the pea in the hand of the conjuror, that Parliament cannot tell which thimble it is under ; and some of the Commissions appear likely to delay their reports to the Day of Judgment. What has become of the report for which Messrs Seed and Batkin scoured the colonies to prepare materials ? We believe it has never even been presented to Parliament. It was simply an ingenious method of providing those distinguished Tito Barnacles with a prolonged holiday tour, to recuperate their constitutions, shattered by long and arduous performance of the trying duties of drawing their salaries, and preventing a horde of clerks from overcrowding and suffocating each other, or burying themselves beneath a mountain of red-tape and sealing-wax.