Public Service

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 772, 7 May 1954, Page 9

Public Service

by

SUNDOWNER

APRIL 16

WOULD be on thinner ice than most people if I joined in the current criticism of public servants. My experience as a public servant was brief; but it was long enough to make me wonder, not what public servants do for their money, but how those who provide so little money eet such loval service.

There was seldom a day during my twelve years

In Wellington when felt-that I could relax. There were days when I felt dull, days when I felt lazy, days when I felt both, but since no one else seemed to get dull or lazy on the same days, the pressure was never lifted. It was sometimes an ambitious selfseeker who prodded me, sometimes a man who was as fearful of vacuity as claustrophobes are of enclosing walls; but it was generally someone who had learnt habits of discipline and hard work, and learnt them and become their slave in the public service. I renewed acquaintance with some of those slaves last week, and came home wondering how any government finds, inspires, and keeps them. I know that virtue is its own reward, and why some of us therefore always feel so poor. But what is the reward for, say, the director and managers of the three agricultural research stations near Hamilton? What government or taxpayer deserves their zeal or their competence or their diligence or their patience? What have the rest of us done to make Ruakura, for example, one of the important animal research stations of the world? Who but its director and staff have carried its fame to Cambridge and Edinburgh, to the hills of Wales, and the great spaces of Australia and the United States? When we talk glibly, and im--pudently, about bureaucracy and red tape, about autocratic officials and lazy underlings, do we mean our ten or twelve overworked judges, the men who design and build our hydro-electric stations, the men in the Department of External Affairs who advise, guide, and |

many times every year steer politicians through the shoals. of international intrigue, the director of education and the inspectors of | schools, the men who made the Rakaia bridge, the creators and controllers of our State forests, the irrigators of Central Otago and = midCanterbury, the conquerors of footrot, mastitis. and contagious abortion, the fighters against hydatids and facial eczema, the men and women on guard against diphtheria, small pox, typhoid -and poliomyelitis? If we include those, and others as important as_ those, our criticism is the babbling of irresponsible yahoos. If we exclude them, we exclude the thousands who work for us with them, including the 200 men and women I saw last week in the

Waikato putting money into our pockets ‘while we sleep, removing sickness and waste and superstition and ignorance from our animal husbandry, and the blight of barrenness from unthrifty soils.

APRIL 17

* * % "How many sheep do you really own? One or two?" "How many do _ shepherds usually own?"

"T don’t believe vou have anv."

"IT don’t like you enough to be anxious to

influence your Deliets. "That is just rude." "But very true." "Go to Hell." "It would be _ pleasanter’ there, wouldn’t it?"

ee eee Sk ee eee. oer ee ee. nee Binge ee ""T REES don’t argue," Harry said. "They do as they're told." Then he climbed up 30 feet, chopped through | a trunk nearly two feet in diameter, and leaned back while it crashed to the ground. It was a dead weight of, nearly a ton, and it fell precisely where. he said it would. A yard either way would have been disastrous. I ceased to be worried. !

APRIL 20

Then a tree did argue, encouraged by | the wind. It was the case in a hundred

where a sudden gust, an_ interlocked branch, a weak strand in a rope,

and the perversity that even inanimate things sometimes display combined to shout "No!" The trunk started to fall the right way, then turned suddenly and went the other: way, making nonsense of attempts to stop it. But it argued. a split second too long. If it | had not paused at the very peak of its swing it would have crashed through a building and made the contents too small to gather up. But it cocked an | arboreal snook at us there, and its | pirouette carried it out of harm’s way. God, Joyce Kilmer and a_ fool poet came into my mind together, but I was careful not to speak. Why should I have spoken? A stand of 50-year-old trees, occupying an almost impregnable position of danger to anyone who disturbed them, had been | brought down safely one by one. Two axes and a saw, three wedges and a blasting gun, a thin rope and two men past sixty-one a Pakeha and the other a Maori-make them into split lengths of four feet in less than three days. It was more than a fine display of energy and skill. It was a demonstration that aroused wonder and admiration and confidence and gave me a glow to be merely a spectator. Will summed it up neatly when he was paying the piper: "I would like to be a Communist for five minutes so that I could give you each a Stakhanov medal." (To be continued)