CANDID CRITIC

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26772, 15 May 1948, Page 8

CANDID CRITIC

TALK ON NEW ZEALAND PEOPLE TOO COMPLACENT MATERIAL FOR ALIEN THEORISTS Special Correspondent LONDON, May i. If New Zealanders who tuned into the 8.8.C.’s special talk on the political implications of the New Zealand character expected to hear a mass of laudatory remarks they were rudely surprised. For this talk, entitled “A Country of Thought,” was on the famous Third Programme, where no punches are pulled, no holds barred. The speaker was Mr John Green, agricultural liaison officer of the 8.8. C.. who visited Australia and New Zealand to study agricultural conditions about a year ago. But Mr Green, seems to have interested himself in far more than the soil. His talk—a long one—aroused much interest (as well as controversy among the London New Zealand colony), and has been repeated on several occasions. “Country of Thought”

If Australia is a country of impulse, said Mr Green, New Zealand by contrast is a country of thought. He felt it was a.classical land: an outpost of civilisation infinitely remote, but intensely conscious of the world. Australia valued her isolation and seemed pleased to let her destiny follow the. course her impetus dictated; New Zealand seemed puzzled and worried by leaving anything to chance. She seemed concentrated on an intellectual pattern.

Mr Green proceeded to give a penetrating analysis of the Dominion’s early days and settlement, and so came to New Zealand under the ageing Labour Government.

‘ The only profession that has seemed to lose its function in this new society is that of the gentleman,” he stated. “I think the shepherd must have acquired the land and the squire became the displaced person. Fortunately, the educated classes were not displaced when young Samuel Butler came out in 1859. . . . In no other country, and at no other time, couid ‘Erewhon’ have been written. It is about a society as theoretical and experimental as Godley’s Canterbury; its penetration is as clear as the air and glacial waters of Rangitata: it is enacted in a setting of the New Zealand Alps, which in other-worldly* grandeur have no rival on earth. ‘ Erewhon,’ too, is no satire if New Zealand politics be viewed with a sense of humour. It can still be revisited.”

Later, Mr Green asked why New Zealand, as a country, is politically capricious. Why should it be doctrinaire about social transitions that had, after all, a material basis?

“The most significant fact,” suggested Mr Green, “is that New Zealand reformers have never been New Zealanders. Social genius is not the cause of native political initiative, so much as the effect of being politically plastic in the hands of alien theorists. . . . They have merely found New Zealand the social laboratory in which to. work, and we are only left to wonder at the ease of their sucesses.” Powers of the State

“ To-day in New Zealand,” Mr Green went.on, “it is impossible to buy a razor blade on a Saturday morning. Not only has the Government a plan of your house, but it may have one of your teeth and intestines. Broadcasting is nationalised. The State is more than a source of social credit, and has become a capital superstructure, in architectural fabric as well as finance.

“A R.N.ZA..F. pilot in uniform will fly you in a Government aeroplane for a handsome profit, while a sergeant checks your, baggage in a Governmentowned railway station. The - bargaining of the individual contractor has become as still as the voice of the bookmaker on a New Zealand racecourse. You may well ask: ‘ls the New Zealander a prig? ’ Individually, he remains a. most delightful person, but "Collectively I think the nation is smug. I found some truth in the Australian warning that they would beg the question—‘ What do you think ol our lovely country? ’ “By spurning individual distinction they are producing a population that is statistically average. This would not matter in appearance, but in though! it can be very depressing. Kipling’s lines—

Who wonder mid our fern why men depart To seek the Happy Isles, has to-day a meaning the poet of Empire did not intend. The Happy Isles for too many New Zealanders of ability are Britain or America. For those who are content with less laborious distinction, the State lotteries of Australia are a nearer solace. “But against this do not gain the impression that the New Zealander takes advantage of his social rights. His complacency has not bred sloth or indifference. He remains courteous and willing, and in the sense that William of Wykeham, not Lord Chesterfield, believed that ‘ manners makyth man,’ he has the best manners that exist on the world’s frontiers. Portentous Legislators “I remember one night in Wellington attending the House of Representatives. I was first irritated by what I considered a portentousness unmerited by the circumstances. I suddenly recalled that the Lancashire County Council governed an area containing more than three times as many people. The Chamber, too, was not in the English sense the jury of a nation, but more reminiscent of the Athenian market place with an added inducement to the demagogue to speak into the microphone (broadcasting Parliament is another New Zealand/innovation). *• Then suddenly the House rose in silence and Big Ben struck 9. I make no apology for my emotion. I felt ashamed of my contemptuous thoughts, and had to disabuse myself of any feeling of flattery. I knew that the. loyalty which'' bound these people to me was not that mv countrymen had proved ‘ good cobbers ’ in the rough and tumble cf history, but that they had also been faithful and sought right judgments. “If, therefore, New Zealand is so regulated and complacent tnat her sons leave home, if she lacks feeling or expression to match her exquisite scenery, let us consider the positive contribution she has made to the world in 100 years. “First, I think we should rate the example of iiving in charity with a native people, who on any other continent in the New World would have been exterminated, if not by force, by the arrogance of western civilisation. “I regard the second achievement, having produced in three wars a citizen army with the attributes we. only expect of a corps d’elite —the classic discipline of the Brigade of Guards and the individual elan of Napoleon’s Old Guard. “Thirdly, if the settlers of Nelson did, as history relates, debate their educational system on the voyage out, they had their reward. In Lord Rutherford they produced possibly the greatest experimental physicist of all time. This typical New Zealand town with the charm of Barnstaple, and the grandeur of Naples, can thus accept without obligation all that the atomic age may have in store for New Zealand and the Pacific.”