be W *nd ifno longed hhi!

The Sacred Saturday Afternoon in the Islands

— winston churchill A Bureaucrat’s Benediction—May the peace of Btircaueraey, which passeth all understandin ff ’,^ s " ve yo !T body in idleness - y°ur mind

--anonymous"'

anonymous.

EVEN in the good times before the wars, Bureaucracy was a thing held * n . d etestation in the Pacific Islands, wnere individualistic types of Europeans

ar f res P°. nsi ble for most of the real de velopment and progress.

When a man Wishes to get On With an enterprise, there is nothing more exasper ating than interference by unimaginative 0fl ?- CialS ' Wh ?- lnSi ?‘ ° n a " d dlr ‘ ectmg operations in accordance with some regulation or other which rarely fits either the circumstances or the occasion.

Since the end of the two wars—“fought for the priceless freedom of the individ

ual!’’—Bureaucracy generally has become more of an evil.

The ranks of officialdom have been strengthened by the addition of countless planners, who want to anply to almost every form of enterprise rules which us ually are impracticable and regulations which nearly always are restrictive; while officialdom generally has drunk deep of the heady wine of trade-unionism and socialism.

Nowadays there is in high places a type of official who thinks it is more important to keep his Saturday afternoon sacred than to keep a ship moving. We have reported examples of native stevedores being encouraged to cease work at noon on Saturdays in New Guinea ports, leaving to the maddened captain the choice of keeping his ship idle there until Monday morning, or sailing away with unloading or loading uncompleted. Recently, in the Solomons, a junior Government official stopped the loading of a copra ship at noon on Saturday, because he thought his precious weekend should not be inter fered with.

There are officials with sufficient vision and education to see where all this is lead ing; but they increasingly are in the minority.

Little by little, the attack on private enterprise and individualism is making it self felt, in the Islands as elsewhere; and, presently, the day will come when production cannot take care of essential needs, and the plain choice before us then will be either (a) work under a well-balanced system of rewards for labour (which is the basis of the Western system); or (b) enforced labour, under dictatorship (which, of course, is Total itarianism—or, if you prefer the com moner name, Muscovite Communism).