New Zealanders Seen As People Without Worries

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29384, 10 December 1960, Page 16

New Zealanders Seen As People Without Worries

(IV.Z. Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, December 8. “The most heart-warming sight in all New Zealand this unlit spring is the New Zealander himself,” says the “Yorkshire Post’s” correspondent, Harold Champion, who has been touring the Dominion. “One’s first impression of these friendly, straight-talking people, most of them of pure English or Scottish stock, is that they have not a worry in the world,” he says.

“ ‘She’s right, mate,’ they tell you whenever you get anywhere near the thorny topics of import restrictions, of a two-year-old car fetching £2OO more than its new price, of not enough people to keep the vast sheep ranges clear of noxious weeds, of the exodus of young people from the wide open spaces to the cities and the almost universal ambition of girls and boys alike to get well away from their native land to the United Kingdom.

“Older New Zealanders undoubtedly think about these things, but they do not worry about them.

“Even a general election doss not excite them. Driving for hundreds of miles I saw hardly a party political poster. Candidates’ meetings were deemed successful when they touched the 40 mark.

“With Labour out and the conservatives in with a fine majority nobody expects much change—nothing much beyond the cancelling of contracts for an unwanted railway near Nelson, the tarring of many more miles of dusty, stony roads and maybe some slight modification of the extremely ambitious and costly social welfare programme.

“No, New Zealanders do not worry. Their’s indeed is the good life. “The cities are quiet, their suburbs well laid out and flowery Out in the remote sheep stations, many extending over thousands of acres, they rough it no more. Homesteads built of the wood which abounds everywhere are equipped with electricallypowered washing machines, refrigerators, and, of course, radios.

“They rejoice in English-style gardens ablaze with delphiniums and roses.

“The nearby river teems with trout and if the housewife fancies a joint of venison this Christmas instead of the everlasting mutton, well, all she has to do is to send her husband out hunting on the forested mountainside. It’s the good life all right. “The haunting, though seldomvoiced fear of New Zealanders of maturer years is that the population may never be adequate to the nation's needs. “Today there are simply not enough people for all the jobs that cry out to be done in her agricultural economy, which ought to be developing essential secondary industries, too,” says the correspondent.

‘‘There is still a great need of selective immigration to supplement the natural increase of European citizens.”