Wanted: ideas for Canterbury

Press, 5 September 1983, Page 16

Wanted: ideas for Canterbury

The Canterbury United Council has a better claim than any other organisation to speak for the province. Trying to discover what it should be saying, the council has produced the booklet, “Which Way Canterbury?”, and has asked the community for its comments and criticisms. Those who dip into the 48-page booklet are likely to come out of it thoroughly confused. A careful reading may guide sympathetic people to what the book says is the essential choice, between economic and social growth or a smaller-scale society, but this is not necessarily the main choice for the community, or even the most important choice to be made. The council has given little indication of what its members, or the compilers of the booklet, might themselves favour, though hints spring from phrases and words and from the presentation of extreme positions. The single message from the council’s discussion of possible futures, and of ways to reach those futures, is that any society is a complex association. Any change will have effects, sometimes in unlikely places and in ways not always intended. Even if there is agreement about desirable social and economic goals — an unlikely prospect — there will remain plenty of argument about how to get there. Perhaps inevitably, planners’ thoughts concentrate on identifying, allocating, conserving, and husbanding physical resources and, quite properly, on preventing destructive and distorting attacks on the natural processes and balances of the environment. This leads, in the extreme, to advocating such vague concepts as “quality of life” as if this were in itself something desirable and attainable. The quality of life can be awful, as it is for millions of people in the world who have little or no access to adequate physical resources, or the means to use them.

Recourse to such phrases is risky at best, meaningless at worst. Too often, in such debates as this book invites, the phrase implies a so-called simple life, but adequate welfare services, energy, and physical health and comfort, really depend on the exploitation of someone efee’s resources — possibly in another part of the world if we have the means to buy them. High-fidelity music, for example, is good for the quality of life, provided the volume is under control, provided • that the record factories are somewhere else, provided that the vast technology behind the equipment is thousands of kilometres away, and provided that the electricity supply comes from an enironmentally sound source. Too often, the “quality of life” choice is not just vague; it is evasive. Perhaps this is the kind of conclusion that the booklet is meant to inspire. Much of what the United Council has to offer will seem too general, or too fanciful, or too pernicious, to have much use. Yet there are few ideas here that cannot be heard expressed by pressure groups or individuals in the community. At one extreme is optimism about unlimited economic growth, based on greatly improved circumstances abroad. At the other,

is optimism about a return to a simple society of sturdy yeomen and village craftsmen, based on a remaking of human nature. The council sets out at some length various theoretical futures, these extremes, and some in between.

It offers a vision of environmental disaster as a result of industry gobbling up resources; its extreme alternative is “very strong State and security controls” to compel a no-growth society. By spelling out the prospects, the council, inadvertently or not, might well encourage readers to turn their attention to more moderate compromises. This leads back to an appreciation of the kind of society, and the kind of changes, that are here already. The point cannot be made too often that Canterbury, or the United Council’s share of it from the Rakaia River to the Conway River, is a fairly convenient geographic entity, but it is in no sense self-sufficient. Nor could it hope to be, except for a primitive subsistence way of life. What happens in Canterbury depends as much on events in the rest of New Zealand, and the rest of the world, as it does on planning in the province. To encourage the proliferation of smaller, more labour-intensive forms of agriculture in Canterbury, for instance, would do nothing for employment, or even survival, if markets do not exist outside Canterbury for the produce. The council cannot assume that the people in its territory will all see their future as lying in the same general direction. To take an obvious contrast, the expectations of people in the Amuri County are likely to be very different from those of people in parts of Christchurch City, though many in each place would like to share features of the other. The United Council depends at present on its ability to advise and influence the actions of its 19 constituent local authorities. No matter how desirable some of its ideas may be, there is a risk that they will founder on the indifference or opposition of others. Amid a babble of voices claiming to be heard, the council’s inability to ensure that its decisions are followed reduces the impact of what the council has to say. The United Council should still be encouraged to speak out. This booklet, and its invitation to everyone in the region to proffer opinions, might help the council to advise others with more assurance. The council is proposing to act as a collecting agency for ideas. To provoke those ideas, it has offered many of its own, whether or not it agrees with them. Critics might argue that the result is likely to be another festival of chatter, a kind of make-work scheme for busybodies while others get on with the business of producing the wealth that the community, including the chatterers, needs to survive. Yet the picture that emerges from the booklet is of a province rich in resources and unused labour. Anything that stimulates ideas about how these might best be employed for everyone’s benefit should not be dismissed. Individual people and organisations should respond.