INDUSTRY FOR SOUTH

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29367, 21 November 1960, Page 12

INDUSTRY FOR SOUTH

Timaru seems to suffer with the South Island generally in a comparative lack of industrial development. We have nothing to compare with Penrose, Auckland, and the Hutt Valley in their mushroom growth of factories,, although since tbe late Mr T. H. Langford opened up as public relations officer in Christchurch, manufacturing has taken a great stride forward there.

Timaru is in the way of setting up a public relations office about now, and it is hoped this will, shall we say, prime the pump or give us a kick start in South Canterbury. Our Chamber of Commerce is active in the matter.

I personally can speak from experience and with feeling in deploring the “too little and too late” industrial progress here in Timaru. Goodness knows, I have tried to change the tune and hury up the timing, with some success, but not enough. It was the drift of our boys and girls, and their parents later, northward to the big smoke that inspired Mr E. Killick to inspire me to propound the policy of decentralisation or dispersal of industry to all who would listen. Mr Killick was town clerk here at the time. The cogency of his plea was arresting. I formed a committee of members of the House from all sides. We met to hear “pep” talks from captains of industry, to discuss the pros and cons, to draw up a plan. Then came the war which lent terrible emphasis everywhere to the Jolly of putting all your industrial eggs In one basket.

The late Mr D. G. Sullivan was Minister. He set up a select committee for industrial development with himself as chairman, and a sub-committee for me on the decentralisation side. The Government adopted that policy of Killick’s. Peter Fraser said I had done a good job. for war and peace. Yet the South Island and Timaru in particular still seem to be running in low gear. What’s wrong with us? Why do so many of us migrate north, probably to Auckland? Is it a matter of climate, or strategic position, or just that nothing succeeds like success—that the thing grows by what it feeds upon? I wish someone would or could tell me. I know the change is bound to come, but why wait? I have always ben one for industrial development, for the teaching of more science, engineering and mathematics in our schools, as well as the humanities. There are some people still who would have this New Zealand "an outlying farm of Empire,” and its people “a.nation of tenant farmers.” Why send food and raw materials 13.000 miles away for people to work for us there when we can have them working with us here? Every nation should be as far as possible selfsunporting. For 30 years I have backed the idea of an aluminium smelting industry, with adequate safeguards, in the far south. Let us develop the “mainland” as it needs and deserves. The Cook Strait power cable would mean for New Zealand as a whole, less electricity at greater cost.

Let us have a new zeal for New Zealand by boosting, in particular the South Island and Timaru —coal, cotton, timber, linen, machinery, chemicals, what else? —pottery, glass, carpets, atomic energy.