AID IS STILL NEEDED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26906, 19 October 1948, Page 4

AID IS STILL NEEDED

A timely reminder that Aid for Britain is still a responsibility that every citizen of New Zealand must be prepared to shoulder was given by the Minister of Agriculture in the course of his address at the opening of the new Dunedin milk centre on Saturday. It is a responsibility to which the attention of the country will frequently need to be drawn if New Zealand is to play its proper part in assisting the restoration of the Mother Country to economic stability. The boast—so often made —that the Dominion has done well, and has received the grateful thanks of Great Britain, has little merit, because, as the majority of the people in this country well know, we could have, and should have, done much better. The Aid to Britain campaign was, and still is, a declaration of real statesmanship, one of the finest contributions to Commonwealth unity that has emerged from the precarious years of peace. It admitted both the extremity of Great Britain’s need and the determination of the Commonwealth, and New Zealand in particular, to see the crisis through. Here was a crusade in which all could join, a nation-wide movement which would enable the peoples who dwelt safely in the shadow of British might during the war years to acknowledge the magnitude of their debt. Aid to Britain, to be effective, requires not only labour and planning on the part of a small body of enthusiasts, but the maintenance of a widespread enthusiasm for the cause that will act as a constant spur on the public conscience. That this enthusiasm is not so much in evidence to-day is not the fault of the founders of the movement, or of those who have worked so hard for its success. The farmers of New Zealand, though lacking labour, machinery and fertilisers —the prerequisites to high production—have performed wonders, and the support for such voluntary schemes as the Barling fat collection plan is evidence of the illimitable fund of goodwill that could be exploited for the benefit of the people of Great Britain. The only essential factor withheld from this widespread urge to make Aid for Britain a vital, dofninating national movement is the proven determination of the Government to suppress the activities of small groups of wreckers who are deliberately sabotaging Great Britain’s recovery by obstructing in every way possible the transport of food and the repeated appeals for greater production. Assisting the Aid for Britain campaign is, as the Minister of Agriculture remarked, an individual responsibility. Conversely, hindering it is an individual offence, an affront to national policy and the country’s will, and the test of the Government’s sincerity in the Aid for Britain movement will be the determination it reveals in removing the real handicaps to a campaign which is directed towards assisting the people of Great Britain through the greatest crisis of their history.