DISTRICTS AND NEEDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 248, 18 October 1924, Page 6

DISTRICTS AND NEEDS.

Is there a marked difference between the various provinces of New Zealand in first-hand knowledge of other parti of the country? We are led to the question by a curious fact mentioned in a recent Parliamentary paper and by one or two things said when deputations waited on Ministers this week on the subject of railway improvements. An intelligent, and apparently well-to-do, fanner from Canterbury, who went to Wellington the other day to give evidence on the Daylight Saving Bill, stated that he had landed in New Zealand in 1885, but this was his first visit to the North Island. It is dangerous arguing from a single case, but we cannot help wondering how many more middle-aged persons there are in the South Island who have never been in the North, or know only a corner of it, and what influence this has had on vSouthern thought upon questions of national development. It may be said that there are many men and women in the North who are just as ignorant of the South. There are, but the fact that during the past generation most of the development has been in the North gives Southern ignorance a special importance. Certainly it takes a great deal to break down an attitude that may be composed as much of invincible prejudice as of sheer ignorance. One sees history persistently misread, ignored, or falsified, and the claims of the North, which are due simply to the development of communities, attributed to greed. The Mayor of Masterton has denied that he said, ''What is the use—everything goes to Auckland?"; but that everything goes (o Auckland because Auckland interests predominate in the Cabinet, has been freely said in the South Island. Koine of these bitter Southern critics seem never to stop to reflect that development in the Auckland province has been exceptionally rapid, and that it is as natural for a growing community to want roads, bridges, railways, to say nothing of universities, as it is for it to want food and clothing. We strongly suspect that some of these critics know very little about Auckland at first-hand, and are not anxious to know. They live in the delectable past when New Zealand was Canterbury and Otago. The Minister of Public Works put no more than the obvious to the Wairarapa deputation when he said that whereas the Wairarapa had been settled many years ago, Auckland was only being settled now. This is a truth which should be plainer to our Wairarapi; friends than to Southerners, though perhaps they will plead that the infamous Rimutaka incline hampers free communication with the rest of tho world. They are lucky to have the Government's promise of a deviation in eight years, especially as the Minister has just said that even when a million has been spent on this the Napier traffic, which some years ago was diverted from the Wairarapa, will still be carried by wav of Palmerston North.