ENTRY AND EXIT PERMITS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25365, 12 December 1947, Page 9

ENTRY AND EXIT PERMITS

U.S. BISHOP’S COMPLAINT ABOUT REGULATIONS

SURVIVAL FOR WAR TIME AUCKLAND, December 11. New Zealanders’ willingness to submit to more regimentation than Americans would tolerate was commented on by Bishop G. A. Oldham, Bishop of Albany, New York, and leader of the Episcopal Church in America Accompanied by his wife, Bishop Oldham has spent a week in New Zealand before returning home from tfie centenary celebrations of the thr ee dioceses of Adelaide, Newcastle, and Melbourne. He is to leave Auckhy Pan-American clipper for the United States to-morrow. “I had to fill in many forms before A YC as allowed into New Zealand,” he said, “but I must say I was surprised to find that you have to fill in almost as many forms before you can leave. After all, I am not a British citizen, and the formalities which have to be complied with before being allowed in would suggest that you don’t want to have me here indefinitely, yet you make it almost as hard to get out. ‘‘The same system is observed in Australia and in England, which I visited a great deal. English civil servants have confessed to me that they cannot see the usefulness of some formalities of this kind, and explain that they have survived from wartime regulations. When I was a young man I travelled all over Europe without a passport. I think that we have gone too much the other way to-day.’ New Zealand’s remoteness was possibly a handicap to her people, Bishop Oldham continued. It encouraged a complacent outlook. That was possiblv the reason too why New Zealanders were more reserved and selfcontained than Australians. “However, I have been received with real friendliness and hospitality. It is just that New Zealanders are a little harder to get to know than Australians or Americans.”

He said that New Zealand qbviously needed a bigger population. Immigrants should be welcomed, and any tendency to look askance at people who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock was to be deprecated. Aifierica had accepted immigrants from all parts of Europe, and their assimilation was now partly her strength.