Plan For Town ‘Frustrated’

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32032, 5 July 1969, Page 46

Plan For Town ‘Frustrated’

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, July 4.

The managing director of the Fletcher Trust and Investment Company, Ltd (Mr J. H. Churton), said last night that political pressures were being made by certain local authorities to frustrate his company’s plans to develop a new town in Pauatahanui, near Wellington.

“The more puritanical side of public opinion resents corporate enterprise exploiting land which would otherwise be reserved for sheep,” he said in the Auckland University School of Engineering winter lecture.

This was the first corporate venture in community building in New Zealand. The two forms of land development in New Zealand so far were not exemplary. One was the 100-acre estate surveyed to produce the maximum number of rectangular lots after removing all trees and flattening the earth. Under this system any land butcher who got scheme plan

approval could put his bulldozers on to a new subdivision without having to integrate with a community plan, because no such thing existed. The other was the State suburb, with its depressing uniformity and soulless regimentation of little boxes and what went into them.

China Trade.—New Zealand exports to China in the nine months to March 31 were worth $2.7m, the Minister of Overseas Trade (Mr Marshall) told Parliament yesterday. Imports from China in this period were valued at s3.Bm, he told a questioner.—(P. A.)