N.Z. ‘Beautiful And Exciting’

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31857, 9 December 1968, Page 26

N.Z. ‘Beautiful And Exciting’

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent)

LONDON, December 8.

A full-page article in Friday’s issue of the “New Statesman” described New Zealand as “a beautiful, developing, exciting country with everything from snow-capped Alps, mountain chair-lifts, hot springs and geysers to hydrangeas bigger than a man’s head.”

C. H. Rolph, who visited New Zealand recently to look at penal institutions and lawreform developments, said the country was “Scotland without the bitter cold and fog that Scots always deny.” New Zealand has “almost no unemployment, a 40-hour week and an expanding Industrial potential that looks like confounding the many critics (mostly Australian) who are determined to see New Zealand as a doomed off-shore sheep-and-cattle farm.” Mr Rolph writes. He says he knows of only two New Zealanders settled in Britain who would not go straight back home if they got the chance. “One comes from Wellington and the other from Bluff," he says. “Wellington’s speciality is hard, horizontal rain and defensively lop-sided pedestrians, and Bluff’s only claim to attention is that it’s the southernmost tip of the South Island.”

Mr Rolph says that it is in the realm of penal institutions and law reform that New Zealand is exciting. “It’s a laboratory, a crucible,” he says. “Usually when you go to look at a country’s prisons you are shown only the best and newest and most experimental. 1 was shown, I suppose for purposes of comparison, a women’s prison in Dunedin, a

shocking place that might have been in Egypt or Moroc

But he discovered that its superintendent and devoted staff proved that the building always mattered less than the people who ran it. Mr Rolph is full of praise for the new maximum security prison at Paremoremo, near Auckland.

“This does everything a maximum-security prison ought to do in the way of imagining and forestalling escape methods (perhaps it even goes a bit too far, if a man ought to be allowed the illusion that he is choosing not to escape), but it’s a perfect illustration of how much freedom and open training there can be inside a really secure perimeter—the best I have seen anywhere in the world."