BBC SPEAKER’S VIEW OF N.Z.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 68, Issue 138, 23 March 1948, Page 3

BBC SPEAKER’S VIEW OF N.Z.

National Virtues and Faults $ LONDON, March 21. “If Australia is a country of impulse, New Zealand, by contrast, is a country of thought,” said John Green in a BBC Third Programme Broadcast. New Zealand was, he felt, a classical land, intensely conscious of the world. She seemed rather puzzled and worried by leaving anything to chance. The New Zealander seemed precisely afraid lest personality, in practice, should drift from its anchorage in character.

Mr Green referred to New' Zealand as “politically capricious,” and to her “chronic social precocity,” and remarked that the most significant fact was that New Zealand’s reformers had never been New Zealanders.

lie thought that, individually, the New Zealander was a most delightful person, but that collectively the nation was smug. By spurning individual distinction she was producing a population that was statistically average.

Mr Green judged that the New r Zealander’s complacency had not bred slothfulness or indifference. He said the New Zealander remained courteous, willing, and in the sense that William of Wykcham believed that “manners makyth man,” he had “the best manners "that exist on the world’s frontiers.” Considering the positive contribution New Zealand has made to the world in 100 years, Mr Green mentioned: (1) the example of living in charity with a native people; (2) having produced in three wars a citizen army with attributes only expected of a corpe d’elite; (3) an educational system which produced Lord Rutherford.