"REBELLIOUS” YOUTH

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29398, 28 December 1960, Page 8

"REBELLIOUS” YOUTH

Tendency To Tilt At Authority

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, December 27. The youth of the world was seeing through authority, the Rev. Alan Booth, a Methodist minister and one of the secretaries to the World Affairs Commission of the World Council of Churches, told the ecumenical youth conference at Lower Hutt tonight. Delivering the theme of the conference, “The Lordship of Christ,” at the opening on the Hutt Recreation Ground, Mr Booth spoke of “this phenomenon of youth that is determined to pull the nose of authority.” New Zealand Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans. Baptists, members of the Church of Friends and the Church of the Cook Islands, a delegation of 40 Australians, Colombo Plan students, Pacific Islanders, and a fraternal delegate to the conference from Hong Kong, Miss Ruth Soong, made up the 1650 who heard Mr Booth.

“I don’t know what you would call this youth,” said Mr Booth. “Teddy boys, bodgies and others —their actions are the same everywhere in the Western world and in Russia.

“Youth has seen through the moral pretension of authority. It is determined to take the ’mickey’ out of even the top nations who have led the world into two world wars. “One of the functions of youth is to ask the awkward questions and don’t be frightened to question those authorities who have no moral guts.” However, although it was “great fun having a dig at authority, it was sometimes worth remembering that the pride and conceit and deception we see in others is what we might have in several years’ time.” Missing Vehicles.—A Ducati power-cycle, number 50-061, taken from outside the Riccarton Hotel on Saturday afternoon, and a black 1948 Morris Eight, Series E, number 348-206, taken from Hackthorne road between 11.30 p.m. on Monday and 12.40 a.m. yesterday, have not yet been recovered.