New proposals for New Zealand

Press, 15 July 1978, Page 15

New proposals for New Zealand

Trade. Growth and Anxiety: New Zealand Beyond the Welfare State. By S. Harvey Franklin. Methuen. 402 pp. $29.95 (hard cover), $24.95 (paper back). (Reviewed by Oliver Riddell)

This weighty book has a combination <rf virtues rare in any book, but particularly rare in books about New Zealand society. It is informative, provoking, stimulating, and about a subject of great importance: what New Zealand is, and what it may be. Unfortunately, for the general reader, the book suffers from the crippling handicap that it is hard to read. Its readership may be confined to professionals in the fields of geography, demography and sociology. Professor Franklin is Professor of Geography at Victoria University of Wellington. He is an immigrant, but has spent some years here and does not make the mistake of many visitors of attributing overseas causes to local phenomena. He is also an intelligent observer of the mundane. To him, the names of 11 members of a schoolboys’- soccer team can be as revealing about New Zealand as any statistical table. Indeed, he warns his readers against taking his statistical tables as gospel. When talking about the regions, he adduces characteristics of New Zealand society from the historic

mismanagement of the soil near East Cape by the three counties there. Such details, when seen in context, as Professor Franklin has tried to see them, are not trivial. Prcrfessor Franklin has tried hard to avoid being labelled as a “guru,” as one of those who can articulate the problems of New Zealand society without providing any solutions. He does not succeed absolutely in this, but he does enough to avoid appearing as an ivory tower academic with nothing practical to offer. However, he cannot avoid one academic weakness. He rides his hobby horse about the need for more research. No doubt more research would be useful, but his insistence becomes irritating, particularly in the sociological parts of his book. The mass of material is not just produced for its own sake. The author seeks to prove his thesis. If 400-odd pages can be reduced to a single sentence, this is “that the future of New Zealand as a society, and as a place where certain aspirations are held by its citizens, is so uncertain that the country (as well as the individuals within it) is suffering from acute anxiety.” New Zealand’s history as a trader rather than a self-contained economy has been shaped by its concurrent history of welfarism in all its forms. He concludes that New Zealand will

have to shift away from welfarism, but is not sure to what or how. He does say that New Zealand should compare itself with similar societies, such as California and Florida, when seeking models for its future. Hanging over this worth-while book is its language problem. Only the most hardened reader will not be affected. Perhaps the thoughts expressed do not lend themselves to ordinary English. If so, the academics have a communication problem. The reviewer never got over a section as early as page 22. It made the rest of the book seem an unassailable cliff. It reads: “The incorporation of the adjacent rural areas in the interstices erf the metropolitan matrices, the impuissance of town planners to cope with urban spread, was an additional source of environmental anxiety. As the 50s and 60s progressed it became more and more difficult near the metropolises to say where they finished — functionally that is.”

So much of what Professor Franklin has to say may never reach those who would be interested by it, or profit from it, because of such disincentives to read further.