The last phrase used by Deputy Cowan must strike the House with some amusement. He asked people to play-act—they could not get a better leader than himself. Deputy Cowan last year voted for the cut in subsidies that raised the price of food and the cost of living. Civil servants fall into one group that felt the effect of the cost of living and they went before the arbitration tribunal, and made a case for a 20 per cent. increase and in their own comments they say that it was not denied by the staff side but was taken to be agreed. Deputy Cowan says he feels sorry for civil servants—but he is afraid to remove from office the Government that will not give the award fully. He has justified himself before his constituents by saying that he will vote for this because it is the best he can do and that he will let others play-act. The Deputy has a reputation for humbug in this House. He has added a new chapter to the whole series with regard to humbugs he has perpetrated since he came into public life.
I am going to speak here on behalf of 63,000 State personnel. I spoke on their behalf for years before I went back into Government and when I was in Government I spoke on their behalf,because I had the feeling, as it was represented to me, that, as Minister for Finance, I was not merely responsible for the Civil Service in its relations with the House and the taxpayers but responsible to them with regard to the treatment they got. The group I belonged to, I felt, were happy in being the people who established a real system of arbitration for the first time in the history of the Civil Service in this country. We gave them real arbitration. We established a system which they welcomed and that system worked well.
Before it became effective, a particular increase in pay was given in the autumn of 1948 and from that we went on to the establishment of the full arbitration machinery, and there never was any doubt in any civil servant's mind, in the mind of any of the people we were dealing with, that, when an award came to be made by the board, it would be met in full. We had to get over a good deal of distrust on the part of the Civil Service because they had been treated for many years very badly. There had been offers made to them of arbitration, offers which were so seriously beset with handicaps that no member of the State personnel could accept what was offered as being a real attempt to meet them. We gave them something which they did accept and welcome and which, I think, they trusted us to carry out fully.
There are about 63,000 of State personnel and the biggest single group of these are the civil servants of the State. There are then the teachers, the personnel of the Army and the personnel of the Guards. These are either directly affected by the arbitration award given to the Civil Service as one group or their emoluments and increases are related to whatever is done for the Civil Service. They await the result of the voting of this Dáil on this modification motion with a good deal of interest, an interest that comes to their homes and their hearths very distinctly.
I have the view of the Civil Service arbitration scheme in relation to themotion on the paper that, if this Dáil were to reject the motion—let us leave out the indirect result of a change of Government—the Government would have to accept the arbitration award in full. So far as I read the arbitration scheme, it is only if the Government is able to persuade Dáil Éireann to pass a resolution, modifying, in whole or in part, the recommendation, that the modification goes through, and, if we reject the modification, it is my view that the award stands in whole and would have to be met by the Government. Apart from that, there is the situation that, on a matter like this, which involves the honesty of Government conduct, if the Government were to be beaten, it is clearly a major defeat on a major subject and the Government would have to yield place to other people.
In that connection, not that I think Deputy Cowan's words will have any effect outside—his own utterances, which have not been marked by the greatest honesty since he came into the House, do not recommend him as a person of any repute in the country —lest anybody might pay any attention to his words, I want to echo what Deputy Norton said. So far as I am concerned for the future, if I again become associated with any Party that forms a Government in this State, I will do it on the condition that whatever is not met of this arbitration award by the present Government will be met by the Government I might help to form. We can give that assurance, as Deputy Norton has given it on behalf of one Party, and if, say, the inter-Party Government were to meet again, just as we did meet our promise with regard to the removal of certain penal taxation of the year 1948, we would honour it. It has been stated on behalf of one Party in the House, and, speaking on behalf of my Party, I can say that whatever is not met of the full award which we are discussing by the present Government will be met by any Government we have anything to do with.
We gave arbitration to the Civil Service because we wanted to avoid a recurrence of what had happened during the war period. The StatisticsOffice produces charts like the chart I have here, which shows two lines which are very widely divergent, the bottom line representing the wages which were "stoodstill" during the war period and the top line, the way in which the cost of living rose, the cost of living being a matter of increases in profits, inducing increases in the prices of certain commodities. The chart assumes a big sausage shape and the interior of the sausage represents what was cut out of the lives of these people who depended on wages or industrial earnings during the period of the war.
The Civil Service, as such, are not shown on a chart like this, but civil servants had their wages "stoodstill" earlier than even the industrial community, and, while the standstill Order remained with certain modifications, the modifications given to the Civil Service were of less value than those given to the outside industrial worker, and the result was that during the war period, civil servants lost, through the impact of that standstill Order upon them, and lost in a most immoral way, a very big sum of money. It was calculated by the Deputy General Secretary of the Conference of the Post Office Workers' Union that the wages standstill Order over the years had cost the Civil Service £6,500,000. I am not responsible for that calculation but I know that it was a very big sum of money.
It was because we thought that type of conduct was immoral that we decided it would not be perpetrated again in our time and that we would leave machinery to avoid a perpetration of it again by any other Government succeeding us, unless they were bold enough to come to the House and destroy completely the machinery for arbitration, conciliation and everything else that we had established. We did establish that machinery. At the time the machinery was being introduced, certain fundamental changes were being made which, as I hold, improved the scheme which we were introducing compared with anything introduced before.
One of those changes was the removal entirely of the prior veto ofthe Minister for Finance on matters which could be referred to arbitration, because that of course was the main objection that there was to previous schemes aiming at arbitration which had been brought in before our time. We were going to remove the ban previously put on association with outside labour bodies; we were going to remove the prohibition on political affiliation; and we were going to remove a variety of restrictions which had encumbered all the previous attempts at arbitration. We did that after conference with civil servants to find out what would be agreeable to them. I do not say that we met them in every point they put up, but we met them in regard to the great majority, and the scheme of arbitration evolved was a good scheme and one which was agreeable to those who were in at the preliminary discussions on it. Improved arbitration was set up and it worked to its first conclusion on the demand for a general increase in pay.
It has been stated here and repeated, that the scheme was only a temporary one and came to an end. It was of its nature provisional, and a review of that scheme was initiated on 28th May, 1951. The letter that went out to the staff associations asking them to assist in the review of the scheme contained a phrase which I feel I was personally responsible for. It asked the staff to get whatever objections or recommendations they had to make together as quickly as possible, as it was expected that very little delay would be necessary before the scheme would be restarted. The whole aim and objective of the circular was to exhort the Civil Service to be speedy with whatever they wanted to bring forward as amendments of the existing scheme, so that the whole machinery could be put into operation as quickly as possible. The review of that, initiated on the 28th May, 1951, and expected to last only a short time, took more than a year. It was not until June, and the end of June, 1952, that the present scheme made its appearance.
Deputy Norton has referred to the remarks of the Minister for Finance with regard to the chairman. I wantto say nothing more about the chairman because, if one does speak of him, the matter is likely to be distorted into a criticism of the chairman but I do want to say that it is wholly wrong for the Minister to represent the chairman as if he were, so to speak, the choice of the staff. The first move in this matter was a letter from the staff sent on the 28th May, 1952, suggesting the appointment of a certain named person. It took eight weeks to get a reply to that and, at the end of eight weeks, there was a letter regretting delay and turning down the suggestion with regard to this particular appointment. In the early days of December the staff wrote a second time agreeing to the selection of another person and that person being agreed on by the Minister for Finance, an approach was made to the person and it was found he could not act but, with the letter refusing the staff's first suggestion there was sent a list of nominees of the Minister for Finance and the staff were invited to select a chairman from that list and the first name selected was from that list and the second name selected, who eventually became chairman of the board, whose report we are discussing, also came from that list. But it is to be remembered that the list was a list of the Minister's nominees and the staff made two attempts to choose. In one case the man would not act and then they chose a second man and he did act. So the arbitration came about.
Deputy Costello has referred to some of the arguments and the whole matter was quoted but it is not improper to refer in this debate to one or two of the points made before the board. Deputy Costello stressed, and it ought to be stressed, that one of the points made by the staff side was that neither at conciliation nor in their counter-statement had the official side attempted to challenge that an increase of 20 per cent. in the cost of living, as reflected in the official index figures, had taken place since January, 1951, and they submitted that it had, therefore, to be inferred that the official side had accepted the fact and that there was no disagreement about it.
In fact, there could not be any great disagreement about it. An attempt was made later by the staff side to argue that the 20 per cent. increase was based upon a wrong date and the figure which had emerged upon a particular date and that another figure should have been chosen but on the date that was chosen the 20 per cent. increase was established beyond any doubt.
The staff side went on to say with regard to their members:—
"They were being forced to cut their consumption of the barest necessities, such as bread, milk and fuel. As a result of the reductions in food subsidies, bread, butter, flour, tea and sugar had increased in price. These were the staple foods of the people—the necessaries of life. They had gone up but wages had not. They had been put outside the reach of the people with subsistence incomes; and no amount of argument about economics or finance could alter the fact that people were being deprived of the necessaries of life."
Anticipating an argument which they knew would be brought forward on the official side they pointed out that the case would be made that there was no money available to the Minister to meet the bill and that, accordingly, the just claims of the staff should be rejected. On behalf of the staff it was submitted that "the board should not be influenced by an argument devoid of any moral basis." That is a phrase that should apply to the speech of the Minister for Finance here. He certainly has not attempted to justify this on any moral basis.
The staff also submitted that:—
"Pay increases in outside employment had been granted with retrospective effect. The Civil Service were compelled to seek such retrospection because the procedure of getting a claim heard by the arbitration board was much slower than in outside employment. They instanced the case of certain employees in the E.S.B. and the Dublin Corporation who had recently obtained increases with effect from 1st April, 1952."
The staff said:—
"The present claim first submitted in July, 1952, was still undetermined in November, and that would not happen in outside employment. If the Civil Service claim had been decided in July there would be a case for making an award effective from a current or near-current date."
Finally, they said:—
"It was not a valid argument against the claim to say that an increase in the pay of the Civil Service would have repercussive effects on the pay of other State employees— the Army, Gardaí, etc. The staff side considered that it was unreasonable to contend that the pay of State employees, whether in the Civil Service, Army or Gardaí, should not be increased, no matter what increases took place in the cost of living."
People who pay attention to the newspapers will remember that the answer to that, that came from what is called the official side, was most alarming. They said that revenue was not coming in to the extent that had been anticipated and that expenditure was outrunning even the heavy estimate of expenditure presented at Budget time. They said there was a short fall, and a very definite short fall, of revenue in most of the sources of revenue. They wound up by saying that the only course, if the civil servants' claim were to be met, would be to increase taxation or reduce the bread subsidy. That threat runs through the great part of this argument, that what the civil servants were forcing upon the community by pressing their claims was that the price of bread would have to be increased and that there would be dear bread for the community in order to provide what was justice or what was regarded as justice for the Civil Service.
The official side spoke of the recent trade recession which, of course, had been due to the Budget and to Government action outside the Budget. They spoke of the yield from direct taxation and said:—
"The yield from direct taxation next year must, therefore, be expectedto reflect the adverse effect on company profits of the recent trade recession."
They spoke of the increases that had occurred in certain goods mainly because of taxation but also due to some pay increases, and they spoke of the revised prices for food which had followed the withdrawal of subsidies—of course that is the start of the whole thing. They appealed to the staff that the only realistic course was to accept the disimprovement in private living standards that was necessarily involved. I take that to be necessarily involved by the Government's policy.
Faced with these arguments and all sorts of statistical information on the official side as to the disappointing yield of certain taxes and certain increases on the expenditure side, the board nevertheless decided to award what we know they did award. They gave an addition of 12½ per cent. on that part of the salary which was up to £200 a year. They gave an increase of 5 per cent. on the portion of salary over £200 and not exceeding £965, and they finally awarded that the foregoing increases should operate with effect on and from 1st November, 1952.
So, against all these horrors that the official side brought forward, the board nevertheless awarded what I think nobody has considered to be a very generous sum. They have given an increase of 12½ per cent. on the first £200 and 5 per cent. on anything else up to £965. This award, which is causing so much trouble, the retrospective element in which the Minister is denying, although it has been awarded by the board with a full sense of the claim made by the Civil Service and, I imagine, with full appreciation of whatever weight was to be attached to whatever arguments were produced, both on the staff side and the official side, then comes into the machinery of conciliation and arbitration that was established by the present Minister for Finance.
It has been pointed out here, and it is necessary to emphasise it, that the Government were bound to accept and to honour the award. The only real exception to that is contained inthe very solemn words in paragraph 20, Section 3:—
"Should the Government decide to adopt course (c) in the preceding sub-paragraph. . ."
That is the course which has been adopted—
". . . in relation to any report of the arbitration board on a claim for a general revision of pay, they will, save in entirely exceptional circumstances. . ."
I might paraphrase the rest; they would not merely pay in each financial year the amount required by the award but they would also pay the amount necessary, if there is retrospection, to make it fully retrospective, and the only circumstance of exception is : "Save in entirely exceptional circumstances." Have we a word about an exceptional circumstance? Have we a word about an entirely exceptional circumstance?
Speaking on the Budget on the 6th of May, as reported in column 1212 of the Official Report for that day, in dealing with the Civil Service arbitration award, the Minister said:—
"The substantial economies which will be vigorously sought and secured in administrative and other expenditure will enable the award to be met in respect of 1953-54, but not for any prior period, without an increase in taxation."
Apart from the matter of the carry over with which I will deal later, that is the only phrase about the Civil Service arbitration award. The only thing about which it was his desire to be timid was an increase in taxation. An increase in taxation cannot be regarded as an entirely exceptional circumstance, because the course set out in paragraph 20 (c) only comes into operation if the Government signify that they consider it would not be possible without imposing additional taxation to give full effect to the findings in the current year. That is an ordinary circumstance which would drive them to adopt course (c). Having adopted course (c), paragraph 20, onereason for that would be to avoid increasing taxation. The taxation was then to provide fully to meet the award in the current year, not in any "entirely exceptional circumstances."
I listened to the Minister talking about the way in which the chairman was appointed. He tried to make a point about the delay in bringing the matter to arbitration. In all the matters he referred to we heard nothing of an entirely exceptional circumstance which would prevent him doing what he signed to do, namely, to accept fully and to carry out any award of the arbitration board. He is not doing it and the only excuse he seems to be relying on is that it would require an increase in taxation, and that he regards as an entirely exceptional matter.
That, therefore, has to be tackled and it can be tackled. There is this matter of the carry over. The phrases which the Minister used with regard to the carry over are to be found in column 1206 of the Official Report of the 6th of May. Dealing with his decision to take £500,000 from this particular lot of moneys for the purpose of defensive equipment, he speaks in this way:—
"Of the remaining £1.4 million, I propose to find £500,000 by drawing on the revenue balances carried forward at the 31st March last."
Here is his description of them:—
"These balances are the Exchequer counterpart of the liquid capital of a going concern. They are paid into the Exchequer in the first few weeks of the financial year when current revenue receipts are meagre and in this way they obviate pro tantothe necessity for temporary borrowings. In recent times, however, the balances have tended to exceed the £2,000,000 or so which is regarded as a reasonable carry over. On 1st April, 1948, the cash balances in the hands of the Revenue Commissioners amounted to almost £1.9 million and over the three years to 1st April, 1951, they were maintained around this level. As a result of fortuitous accretions over the past two years, however, the figure at 1st April last had risen to £2.5 million. They willnow be drawn upon to the extent and for the special purpose which I have mentioned, thereby reducing them to a round £2,000,000.”
That is the carry over, the Exchequer counterpart of the liquid capital of a going concern which is paid into the Exchequer in the first weeks of the financial year when current revenue receipts are meagre.
That point was also made by the Minister in a letter which he wrote to the papers in reply to a letter of mine. He spoke of these balances in these terms in a letter dated 12/11/1952:—
"These balances provide essential relief for the Exchequer during the lean opening months of the financial year. The amount of the balances at the end of 1947-48 was £2,251,045 and the principle has been to maintain them at or around this level by relying on the revenue collected each year to meet expenditure incurred in that year."
Later he says:—
"The fact is that the Exchequer carry over is the working cash balance that must be held in hand at the beginning of every financial year."
A sum of £2,500,000 is an enormous carry over in a country like this. As Deputy Costello said, at a certain period when I had dealings with finance I made up my mind that it was far too large an amount and I spoke at the time to the officials concerned about my own view in the matter. The programme I had set out to achieve was that year by year I would reduce that balance by somewhere between £600,000 and £750,000 until we had reduced it to somewhere about the £500,000 point. Then I said I would consider how far it could be reduced further. But revenue was good in my time and I never had to draw £600,000 out of that carry over and reduce the amount carried forward to the next year to what I took out in any year. Revenue was always buoyant and the result was that that £2,000,000, or thereabouts, remained all the time.
I had inquiries made and got certain replies from departmental officials withregard to the matter. I asked for a return which would show the balance of revenue remaining in the hands of the Revenue Commissioners at each 31st March and I got it traced back during the years. It started in 1923 when the balance retained was £171,000. It went down to £108,000 in 1924 and it rose to £111,000 in 1925. In 1927, for the first time it rose above £250,000. In 1931 it went down to £10,000. From 1923 to 1932, the average over these ten years was £140,000. A sum of £140,000 was regarded as an adequate amount of money to have in reserve to meet the lean times, the time when revenue was meagre, according to these statements, when expenditure runs at a rather high level and there is not enough revenue to meet it. After 1933 the balance of about £140,000 was more or less maintained. It went up to £162,000, and in the year 1934 it dropped to £19,000. It rose in 1935 to £79,000. It reached the £200,000 mark again about 1936. In 1939, the year before the war, the carry over was £71,000 and it was only when we entered the war period that it rose to something like the proportions to which we have been accustomed in recent years. In 1941 it crossed the £1,000,000, mark. In 1942 it reached £1,330,000. It decreased slightly in the next year, 1943, and it went up to almost £1,600,000 in 1944. It went almost to £1,750,000 in 1945. It came down in 1946 and in 1947 it went up to £2,333,000. After that, as has been said, it kept around about the figure of £1.9 million for some years and last year it rose to £2.5 million.
I got that statement showing the amount in the carry over and, having got it, I began to look for the reason for it. I got the usual statements that are made here by the Minister for Finance: one had to think, of course, of the lean period at the beginning of a financial year; expenditure was still running high; one might not get enough money in. I again asked for an investigation. I asked for a return of the expenditure in each of the first four weeks in April and the three years I chose for that investigation were 1948, 1949 and 1950. I asked for a return for the second four weeks—thatis, the second month—in each of these years. I asked for the revenue, excluding the carry over and excluding any siphoning in of any part of the carried-over moneys.
I have not carried out the investigation beyond those three years but as far as my memory serves me—I have only got the record here for three years —I never found a year, save one, in which there was any necessity to have any greater amount of money in the till at the end of the financial year than, say, £100,000. In 1949, the revenue in the first eight weeks was £9,390,000; expenditure was £7,726,000. In 1950 the revenue in the first eight weeks was again about £9,000,000 and expenditure was £8.7 million. In 1948 there was an exceptional circumstance and the revenue in that year, without the carry over, would not have been sufficient; it would have been short by about £900,000 to meet the outgoings. That, of course, was due to the fact that in the early part of the year when the new Government came into office they remitted the impositions on tobacco and other things; that remission meant a loss of about £6,000,000 over the year and that showed its effect at once but, save for that exceptional year, there was no year in which it was necessary to have a substantial carry over. Indeed, if there is any year, I would like to hear which one it was. Is there any year in which facts prove the necessity for any carry over of a larger sum than £100,000? I assert there is none.
I would not be troubled if expenditure ran in excess of revenue by even £1,000,000 or so, in the first eight weeks. There are such devices as short-term borrowings and, so long as revenue over the whole year meets expenditure over the whole year, nobody will worry about what happens in an exceptional first or second month in an exceptional year. The records show that there is no necessity to have this enormous sum of money retained as what is described as "liquid balance" to meet the meagre period when money is not coming in and when expenditure is running high.
That being the case, we have herenow a situation in which, I suppose, nobody will deny that if the State has this money the Government should honour the Civil Service Arbitration Board award. The one thing the Minister has not given us in his apologia in this matter is how much is being pinched from State personnel by the Government not honouring the retrospective element in this award. I put the sum myself at a figure of £900,000; that is to say, the 63,000 State personnel are having pilfered from them a sum of £900,000 due to them on foot of the award. I assume most people would regard that as an obligation the Government should meet and I assume that the only answer that can be made here to me, or to any other speaker, in justification for not meeting that obligation is: "We have not got the money." In fact, the money is there. There is enough money available to pay this sum twice over. It is certainly quite easy to abstract £900,000 out of this £2,000,000 carry over. Am I to be told this is bad finance? This year the Minister has decided to take £500,000 of that carry over of £2,000,000 in order to purchase defensive equipment. Is not our obligation to State personnel something that should be considered more seriously than the purchase of, as I said in my Budget speech, weapons that are likely to become obsolete within a few months of their being brought in here? I assume most Deputies would feel better pleased and would feel that they had something off their consciences if this money to meet the Government's obligation to State personnel could be found to implement the award of the arbitration board. Where does the bad finance come in in the conclusion that £2,000,000 is not required as a carry over, that it is an unnecessary amount of money to carry over from year to year.
I have given a statement of my own experiences. I decided with my colleagues to reduce that carry over to £600,000 per annum until such time as we were likely to get a manageable figure. I asked for the returns. I have produced the record for three years. Is there any return that can be brought here to show the necessity for holding in hands, even if one acceptsthere must be something held in hands against a possible emergency, anything more than £100,000? I believe there is not.
I want to emphasise the other argument that, even if the point is made that there are some years in which more than £100,000 is required to keep the balance even, I do not regard that as an argument for carrying forward year after year a sum in the region of £1.9 million or £2.5 million when there is no immediate need for it. Honesty and honour demand that the Government should meet the arbitration award. The money is there. If the only argument the Government can produce is to tell us yet again that it cannot be done without taxation, I say it can. If I am told this is a fund that should not be raided for that purpose, I ask what is the fund for? If it is right to raid it for defensive equipment is it not right to raid it to meet the demands of those who on their own statement, and that statement was accepted by the arbitration board, are driven to restricting themselves in the necessities of life because of the inadequacy of their pay in relation to the cost of provisions, a cost mainly affected by Government action?
I suggest we can do what honour and honesty require should be done. The Government in face of what the Minister has revealed in relation to the carry over, cannot plead the necessity to tax in excuse of their action in this matter. I also urge that the House should not accept the contention of the necessity to tax as a relevant objection contemplated by those who framed this arbitration machinery. This is not an entirely exceptional circumstance of a type that would warrant the award not being met in full.
Undoubtedly this debate will be used to defame civil servants and State personnel throughout the country. Already an effort has been made by even hangers-on, like Deputy Cowan, to argue that if it was not for the civil servants there could have been remissions in taxation this year and last year. He says civil servants are being brought into politics. I think they should be at least so far in politics that people could plead theircase for them without their being smeared in that deft fashion of which Deputy Cowan is such a master. I object to their being brought in in opposition to claims by other sections of the community for alleviations in taxation. By their introduction into politics in that way they are painted, so to speak, as the enemy of the rest of the people, absorbing money that could otherwise be spent on other purposes or used to give those reductions for which everybody is crying out.
Those who framed last year's Budget and reduced the food subsidies surely must have had before their minds that if food subsidies were reduced, the cost of food raised and the cost of living raised, State personnel had a case with which to go before an arbitration board for an increase. The Budget was hardly passed when one of the trade union congresses came to a calculation that a 12/- a week increase was required. I understand that the arbitration award for the Civil Service is based pretty definitely on that 12/- a week increase. It was a calculation that the trade unionists could make within a month after the Budget made its appearance. It could have been easily foretold what the arbitration award was going to cost the Government and the country because of the reduction in the food subsidies. The food subsidies reduction in last year's Budget was going to mean a profit of £3.9 millions, call it £4,000,000. Take away the £2.4 million that has now been conceded as the just claim of State personnel and you will see how utterly foolish was that move last year to reduce subsidies.
We know that wages have risen all round the country. Imposts of 2/- or 3/-, or 4/- and 5/- in the £ in some cases, have been put upon the ratepayers of the country. All of that has been the result of last year's Budget. Increases in wages had to be granted because of the increase in the cost of living due to the Budget. All the Budget did was to hide some of the results for a while. Now we are getting the figures which ought to have been added into last year's Budget statement and we are going to have them added in openly this year. The costof the food subsidies was saved as a Government expenditure and was thrown on to industries. Various wage claims were successfully made and imposed upon industrialists outside; local authorities have had their claims to meet and the rates showed the answer. Again it all amounts to showing how completely ridiculous was this effort to save money by the reduction of food subsidies last year.
Now the civil servants are going to be paraded as the enemy of the people because they are absorbing £2.4 million that could have meant a reduction in taxation. You would think that civil servants were inhuman, that they can pull in on any slackening off, that they can nearly all cut their rations and that they can be made to impose further rationing on their wives and families particularly with regard to the lower paid civil servant. If he can pull in on any slackening, it is going to hurt somewhere, either from the point of view of food and clothing or the education he provides for his family. Unless there is some such inhuman point of view accepted for the Civil Service, it is quite clear they had to get the minimum, as they have been given the minimum, to meet the changes brought about in their lives by last year' Budget.
The Government is now parading the civil servants as the people who are absorbing what the rest of the community might have got in relief of taxation. Already cries are being raised, fostered by propagandists on the Government side, that there are too many civil servants, that they are doing no work and that they are getting this immense sum of money. We on this side of the House are going to be paraded as the enemies of the industrial and farming community because we want extra money for the Civil Service, and because that means extra taxation. It is quite clear it does not mean extra taxation; the money is there to be distributed.
There is no redundancy in the Civil Service as it is worked. The late Secretary of the Department of Finance is on record as saying that there was not a single man in the Civil Serviceextra to requirements. That was a well chosen phrase. As long as the system of government and of handling public money continues as it is at the moment, you will get no reduction in the numbers of civil servants. It has been said that in 1950 the officers known as organisation and method officers were appointed. That was done with the assent of my colleagues and myself in an endeavour to find out if there was any work being done which could be avoided and whether we could get any reduction in the personnel without hardship to that personnel.
That was only the early stage in the movement to get some better handling of public finance and some better method of dealing with public business. I had got no definite plan but I was getting one developed and the suggestions I made to my colleagues were accepted by them. It would, I believe, have meant a reduction in the numbers of civil servants but it would have meant a couple of other things. It would have meant a new outlook on what were the functions of the Comptroller and Auditor-General. It would have meant what would have been, as far as I was concerned, a welcome development, the complete abolition of the Public Accounts Committee.
Without any disrespect to the personnel who sat on it, I say that committee has done no useful work since this State was founded. It would have meant coming to this House and making a case for a new system of looking after the public accounts. All that could have been done and when that would have been done the public would have been better able to bear the cost of the Civil Service, because that cost must be measured by numbers and proper emoluments given to those people. There is no use trying to reduce expenditure in this country by cutting their wages or their emoluments. All one can do is see that good value is given and that the numbers are appropriate to the work done.
There is a wastage in the Civil Service of about 1,000 a year arising from those who leave on the ordinary retirement basis, those who go to other occupations—and they are very few— and those who die or, on the femaleside, those who retire on marriage. That wastage of 1,000 could have been usefully employed to reduce gradually and without any hardship to the serving civil servant, the numbers employed. Certain considerations would have to be taken into account such as the various families educating their children for entry to the Civil Service; it would not be reasonable to cut the numbers off completely but over the years a change could have been made. That change will be made some day, and until that change is made this country will have to put up with the result of Government folly exhibited through the Civil Service as much as anywhere else.
If the Government is foolish enough not to consider the repercussion due to the reduction of food subsidies, they must meet the increases which follow from the rise in the cost of living and which result in further charges to the State. It is because of the Government's folly in reducing the food subsidies last year that we are now faced with a bill of £2.4 million for the whole State personnel in this financial year.
A board which nobody has criticised as being unfair—nobody has said a word against the chairman or against the people who sat on that board—has made an award to the Civil Service. No member from any part of this House has said that it was an extravagant award. The only phrase we used was that it was not very liberal. As measured by outside standards and by what was achieved in outside employment, it does not rank very highly. However, we are asked to be content merely to give civil servants what they are entitled to in this year. The arbitrator, frightened though he must have been by all these woeful statements— failure of the revenue and increase in expenditure—decided in favour of this increase extending back to 1st November last year. Without any reason given and without any exceptional circumstances being marked, we are asked to accept that as something generous. Deputy Cowan said if we do not give them that the civil servants will get nothing. He hides behind the lame excuse that he will vote for this motion because otherwise civil servants would not get anything.
I suggest that we can come to a different decision. The money is there and there is no question of an increase in taxation. Under the scheme as it stands if the motion is adopted it would involve a modification but assuming that it is not passed, I suggest that the arbitrator's award would have to be met in full. Apart from that if we vote against this, and if we get rid of a Government that is not going to give civil servants what the arbitrators thought they should get, that Government can only be replaced by one of two Parties that have already pledged themselves to give the civil servants the full award. That is the choice before the House.
