AFTER THE WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 November 1941, Page 2

AFTER THE WAR

A DANGER TO BE MET

BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL' CONDEMNED.

ATTITUDE OF RETURNED SOLDIERS.

(By Telegraph—Press Association.) INVERCARGILL, November 6. The danger of bureaucratic control of 1 industry and commerce through government by' civil servants was emphasised by Mr Gordon Fraser, New Plymouth, in his presidential address at the annual conference of the Associated . Chambers of Commerce which opened here today. “The major determining factor in our country’s- policy and outlook at the conclusion of the war will be the attitude of the one hundred, thousand returned soldiers who have come back from the \var,” said Mr Fraser. “Many of these returned soldiers will return vastly changed in outlook. ’ During the years of army life they will have been subjected to rigid discipline, suppression of individuality and obliteration of the right of selfexpression, Their one desire will be to put these years behind them, and they will chafe with fierce restlessness under the controls and ineptitudes that they will find if we continue our precent course. Their opinion will be dominant in the country. Will they tolerate some of the conditions they find?

“First and foremost, will they toler- 1 ate the dead weight of bureaucratic ■ thought in which New Zealand is steadily becoming enmeshed? By its ; very training and the circumstances cf its work the public service tends to become cautious and conservative, always playing for safety and drifting toward the green slime of a stagnant backwater. Experience has shown that you cannot run industries successfully from Government offices. You cannot get things done. Real leadership is squashed under a mountain of red tape. There is little incentive for virile achievement. Must we not organise our business and our Government not for stability but for continuous and deliberate change? Will the returned soldie'rs not demand that we b,e dynamic instead of static? “Indeed, will not the returned soldiers with the experience they have gained abroad be justified in thinking much harder things of the steady envelopment of New Zealand in bureaucratic control? There is no more dangerous instrument than newlyacquired power. “If there is one thing more than ancther 1 that the soldier will long for on his return to New Zealand is it not the private liberty from which he has been parted since he left these shores, and the justice which in many cases he has found incompatible with life in. the army? Will he not revolt against the assumption by Ministers of the Crown and. their officials of powers which in a liberty-loving country should be held only by the courts or by Parliament? Will he not demand an immediate return of the fundamental right of appeal to the law courts when he feels he has not received justice, and will he tolerate government by masses of regulations which have never been authorised by Parliament, and which in' a democratic country should essentially be subordinate rather than supreme, specific instead of general? “All these factors have had and will have a deep influence on the life, work and well being of the business .community.”