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Concurrently with these events a radical and ever-increasing departure from, the free-will land-use policy has developed as a result of excessive erosion and flooding in many parts of the Dominion. Recent legislation has established that in some cases a land owner may be restricted in the use of his land. Following the Taupo fires .some measure of compulsion in observing minimum desiderata in fire protection has become widely recognized, and now legislation has been drafted following numerous discussions .and various conferences with all interests concerned. There still remains the vital problem of private forest management, and a study of the latest legislation in overseas •countries is now in progress with a view to evolving an acceptable concept of control .and incorporating it in a consolidated forest statute. 2. Organization, Recruitment, Training.-—With staff concentrated largely upon administrative reforms and practices in timber sales and upon large-scale exotic forest it was possible for the Forest Service to operate for almost twenty years on a broad organizational basis. Administration was decentralized in conservancies .as major territorial charges, but neither in these nor in Head Office was sufficient specialization developed to warrant detailed organization. Only with the accumulated arrears of silvicultural. work in the exotic forests assuming threatening proportions and with the appointment of a significant number of technically qualified forest officers in 1939-40 was it possible to plan for the development of work on a divisional basis. With the intervention of the war, reorganization was delayed until 1946, but, even so, personnel difficulties have allowed but reasonable staffing of only five divisions—.services (clerical, accountancy, legal), engineering, development (training and research), commercial (timber sales, logging, sawmilling, &c.), and management (working plans, silviculture, &c.). One other division—public and private forestry—has as yet only a token staff, whilst two others—conservation and industrial —remain to be developed as suitable staff can be trained and assigned to these activities. Like many technical organizations created in a new country, only a few key administrative and technical personnel were secured from abroad, virtually all the remaining administrative, field, and clerical staff being recruited from land-adminis--trative organizations. Not unnaturally the field staff, qualifying by experience as they could for administrative posts at conservancy level, attracted the best officers for some eighteen years, during which time the number of technically trained personnel did not rise above seven, and some of the most promising clerical officers were lost to other Departments where promotion seemed more assured. When eventually in 1939-40 it was possible to secure the services of fourteen additional technically trained staff, the necessity for more highly qualified administrative officers had become so acute that it was necessary to allocate the most promising to administrative rather than to technical duties. The result was to further discourage the -clerical staff as well as to cause apprehension in the minds of the field staff, but eight years of a firm and aggressive system of promotion and salary adjustment solely by merit .and without regard to seniority or to divisional classification—Professional (technically • qualified), General (field), or Clerical —has had the desired effect of reassuring all officers that they have equal opportunities for advancement. Lack of recruitment during the pre-war decade following the depression, together with the absence of graduate foresters due to the closing of the two University Schools of Forestry, had created such a gap in the departmental cadre by 1939 that it was necessary to evolve a plan which would ensure a regular quota of all grades and divisions -of officers for the future requirements of the Dominion. The basis of this planning, which accepted as a principle the inseparable relationship of recruitment and training, was the development of a twenty-year staff objective. Forecasting numerically the administrative and executive staff which would be required to implement existing and projected forest works, it was disclosed that the technically qualified staff would have to be almost and the field staff trebled.

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