RURAL ADMINISTRATORS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4817, 31 July 1939, Page 2

RURAL ADMINISTRATORS

NEED FOR DEVELOPMENT STRESSED.

STOPPING DRIFT TO URBAN CENTRES.

There was a challenge to rural administrators and administration to put their house in order so that they could foster and develop their areas and thereby strengthen their own field so that they would become for all time a necessary and integral part of the government of the nation, said Mr. C. J. Tablot, president of the New Zealand Counties' Association, during an address to the biennial conference of the association in Wellington.

"For our own protection we must see to'it that our population is not concentrated in a few of the larger centres on the coast where in the first flurry of combat all arterial roads for the evacuation of the population would become jammed and become death traps because of menace from the skies," said Mr. Talbot.

The tendency in education to-day was to centralise schools, in order to. improve the standard of education for the children in rural areas. In other words —to give the children, in those localities equal facilities and equal chances of an education equivalent to that obtained by the urban child. If they were educated to an equal degree, and if they had rubbed shoulders with the town child, could the rural youth be expected to go back to primitive conditions of country life?

Lack of recreational facilities, lack of suitable lack of further and continual study in the form of adult community centres, libraries, drama and other amenities in country areas would all tend to make the town and cities more attractive than the country. That point he would like to stress very specially because he believed that in the future county councils could do much to stop the very undesirable drift to the urban centres.

Ever since the industrial age began more than 100 years ago, the countryside not only culturally and socially, but also in economic opportunity, had been increasingly dependent on urban civilisation. Modern transport was completing the process, so that the rural community, specially the young-

er, had turned their faces to the town.

"Let us make this transport our friend. Let it make the rural region compact and accessible from all points and weld it into a social unity.

"Our future civilisation is not going to depend so much on what we do when we work, as on what we do in our leisure. We are organising the production of leisure, but we need better organisation to secure the maximum utility and enjoyment. Let there be a cultural centre for the rural area. Let there be community centres and educational centres where rural life can and will meet." Mr. Talbot said he saw the county councils of the future a greatly strengthened unit of the local government of the nation. He saw it planning Greenfield townships where the

rural population would be housed in modern homes, under the county housing schemes, with pure water supplies, underground sewerage, electricity, community halls, free libraries, inter-connected with a national education system, the national health department, the national fitness council, and being a unit in national defence.