COOK ISLANDS GROUP

Northern Advocate, 7 November 1932, Page 6

COOK ISLANDS GROUP

M 1 XISTE RIA L ST AT EMENT. VALUE OF CIVILISATION. ! (From Our Parliamentary Pneclal.) WELLINGTON, This Day. That the value of New Zealand’s civilising mission in the Cook Islands cannot be judged in terms of monetary cost alone was demonstrated in a. considered statement presented to the House last week by Sir Apirana Ngata, Minister in charge of the Group. The statement was a reply, in part, to the proposals of the National Expenditure Commission. The commission, said the Minister, recommended that the cost of the Coqk Islands administration be reduced by amalgamating the department with that of External Affairs, and cutting the Treasury grant to £IO,OOO, special mention being made of a reduction in the expenditure on education. The resultant estimated savings in the current appropriations were £II,OOO, and such further economies as might follow the suggested departmental merger. Sir Apirana said the cost to the New Zealand Treasury for services, apart from the Maui Pomare, for 1931-32, was £1 11s 4.6 d per head of the Island population, analysed as follows: — Education, 12s 9.3 d; medical health, 7s 9d; other services, 10s 10.3 d. That compared more than favourably with many administrative areas in New Zealand. The total expenditure by the State on education in the Dominion for 1931 32 was nearly four times as much as that in the Cook Group, and on medical and health services, nearly twice as much. “The services,” said the Minister, “appreciate in importance and value when regarded in relation to British influence in the Pacific Ocean and New Zealand’s position of trust and guardianship over a considerable section of the aboriginal Polynesian race. It would not have been regarded as extravagant .if Budget costs had been two or three times as high as they have actually reached, provided the results of New Zealand’s civilising mission, judged by all standards, were satisfactory. These have shown that, whether in the statistics relating to the physical, social and moral welfare, or in observations dealing with the hap--piness and contentment of the population, or even in the figures, which recount exports and imports or tabulate revenues and expenditures, New Zealand has achieved an outstanding success in the administration affairs of the Cook Group.” The point was made by the Minister that when the islands were annexed the native population was regarded as a dying race. Under the administration, not only had the ravages of infantile mortality and tropical- and imported diseases been arrested, but modern scientific methods, the spread of education, improved hygiene, and the provision of a hospital and of efficient , medical and nursing staffs, had turned the tide, so that at the end of the last financial year the announcement could be made that the population was increasing at the rate of 20 per thousand. One-fourth of the grant from the Consolidated Fund for 1931-32 was devoted to medical work, representing an expenditure of 7s 9d per head of the population, compared with Ms 7d per head for New Zealand, an important item in the medical budget being the service of lepers. If the measures taken in Hie last six months to arrest the spread of leprosy and for the organisation of curative treatment prove successful, the expenditure under that heading might be regarded as a decreasing item, but it could not be suddenly curtailed 50 per cent., as suggested by the commission. Items had to be maintained in the Budget for social services to cover the education of natives at medical schools in New Zealand and Fiji, ground sanitation calculated to minimise the spread of disease, and the provision of adequate supplies of good water. On the comparative figures regarding the cost of education, the New Zealand taxpayer, said the Minister, could not complain that the white man’s burden in the Islands was all out of proportion to what he bore in ' respect to the children of his own race or the Maori race. “New Zealand cannot now shirk the. most important, the most far-reaching in implication and effect, the gravest task that any representative of white civilisation can undertake in respect of native communities,” the Minister declared. “Experts may differ as to the method or standard or degree of education that should be aimed at. Governments may debate the wisdom of a ‘white collar’ education or the safe extent of ‘English’ in curriculum. For good or for evil, the missionaries and the seamen, the traders and the tourists, and the officers of the Government have brought the complicated problems of the great world to the reefs and atolls and to the beaches and palm groves of the South Sea Islands, and their culture, with all its unrest and stirrings, its trials and tribulations, cannot now be barred by any device of man. To deny sufficient education to the Polynesian tribes in these islands would not bo humane; i.‘, would not be manly or sportsmanlike; it would not be worthy of decent British traditions. The Polynesian must be given a sporting chance to understand the world into which he has been projected to fill his part efficiently; and civilisation has not yet. devised any better method than the patient impressing of itself upon the mentality of subject peoples, and the demonstration in manifold experiener of what it demands, that they may attain ease, confidence and comfort in the new environment which weaves around them,”