Ng's New Salary

Plan Is Pea And

Thimble Trick

From Stuart Inder, in Port Moresby New Guineans working for the Administration could be heard giving loud raspberries from one end of the territory to the other in September following the an nouncement that the P-NG Pub lic Service was to have a single line of service. For them it was a thimble and pea trick —now you see it, now you don’t.

A SINGLE line service means that the present system of different salary classifications for local (New Guinean) officers and for overseas officers will be abolished and only one line of salaries will be shown.

This will be the lower salary range at present paid to the local officers.

But it doesn’t mean that the over seas officers—the Australians em ployed in the Administration—will receive the wages that the New Guineans do. There will be no re duction in overseas salaries, and the present whopping salary difference between local and overseas men will be preserved in the form of separate allowances for overseas officers.

Different Bookkeeping

In other words, the bookkeeping, not the money, will be different.

The territory’s Treasurer, Mr. A.

P. Newman, in announcing that the new salary structure would be intro duced as soon as legislation could be prepared, admitted that the primary reason for the change was to “recognise the need to express the salaries in a less discriminatory way”.

Although he did not specifically say it, it is embarrassing to the Gov ernment to see two sets of salaries for the same job appear side-by-side in the Government Gazette.

The new recommendation, which is the result of the work of a special Public Service Committee established in August last year to consider ways of integrating the Public Service, wasn’t—extraordinarily enough—re ceived any better by the Public Service Association.

The association has protested to the Minister for Territories, Mr.

Barnes, that local officers are not

deceived, and that overseas officers will not accept lowering of basic salaries, whatever they might get in allowances.

The new move is in line with the trick played by the NG Admini strator in 1964 when it put up the rents of Administration houses, but then reduced them for overseas officers only, by paying a special expatriate housing allowance.

The gentlemen who arranged that three card trick, and who are also behind the latest fiddle, obviously never heard of a former Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Mr. E. C. Eliot, and of his fight against a two-price system which operated in the trade stores on Ocean Island more than 50 years ago.

The Pacific Phosphate Company, which had a monopoly on trading rights, at that time charged one price for natives and a lower one for

Europeans. After Mr. Eliot finally got a protest through to the Colonial Office, the trade stores made reduc tions in prices on things the natives seldom if ever bought, and raised the white man’s price to one slightly below the old native rate on all articles most in demand by the natives.

And for good luck the company announced that all white men would in future buy on the “book system”, and a discount would be allowed at the end of each month to bring their prices down to exactly what they were before.

Mr. Eliot finally resigned from the Colonial Service, because among other things he couldn’t get Colonial Office support in his fight against this kind of discrimination.

He’s dead now, otherwise you can be sure he would have had some blistering things to say about the New Guinea Administration!