ISLAND GOVERNMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 235, 4 October 1935, Page 6

ISLAND GOVERNMENT.

NEW ZEALAND'S TASKS.

(By J.C.)

Tlio proposal of tho External Affairs Department that tlio South Sea Inlands under New Zealand's control should be administered eventually by university graduates with special training for work in Polynesia is excellent in principle. The suggestion is that in respect first of the mandated territory of Western Samoa, young university men who have gone through a course of ethnological studies should be fed into Colonial Service to take the principal posts. This paper has long advocated such a course in respect of the administrators of Samoa. Those islands have had a surfeit of military and ex-military officers and of New Zealand police who have been placed in authority over the heads of the high chiefs. None of these men had had any special training or possessed any special experience qualifying them for the government of Polynesian races. New Zealand has had twenty years in which to experiment with Samoa, and it is fully time that a change was made. Native Participation. But in this building up of a "Colonial Service" for the Islands it must be remembered that the field is very limited, and that with the exception of half a dozen officers or so in Samoa, the native peoples themselves should be encouraged and assisted to take the administrative posts. Samoa is already overweighted with expensive white officers. Tho Samoan people governed themselves long before they ever saw a white man, and they will do it again wlien tho heavy hand of New Zealand officialism is lifted. There is too marked a tendency at headquarters in Wellington to treat Samoa as if it were a possession of New Zealand, instead of a temporarily mandated country wlioeo inhabitants are eventually to bo restored tlieir rightful place as a sovereign people. That duty seems in danger of being forgotten.

Tonga's people govern themselves, under the protecting ward of the British Government. A similar ideal should be kept in mind in respect of Samoa,'whose people are at least as intelligent and caipable a race as the Tongans.

A change in the type of men sent to Samoa is long overdue, and long overdue, too, is the

restoration of the chiefs to their olden position of authority. Further, it is desirable that university education for future rulers of Samoa should not be confined to New Zealanders. What of tlio Samoans themselves? Why cannot selected youths from the native schools be brought to New Zealand for education with a view to fitting them for the future administration of their own country in place of so many white officers ? What has been done in Tonga successfully can be clone in Samoa, if New Zealand 'will reverse its drill-book methods. A Pattern to "Civilised" Lands. Samoa in time should have its own administrators and specialists in medicine, education and agriculture. Why should not Pomares, Ngatas and Te Rangihiroas arise in Samoa? These islands in their social and industrial conditions, like Tonga and Niue and Rarotonga, are a pattern to great "civilised" lands. Their own civilisation produces a far greater measure of happiness and comfort than is possible in the great outside world, which has made such a horrible mess of its affairs. The less these people under our guardianship are managed according to outworn European ideas the better.