SELFISH MOTIVE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26917, 1 November 1948, Page 6

SELFISH MOTIVE

ATTITUDE TO 30CIAL SECURITY DR RAPHAEL DISAPPOINTED “ I must confess that I was a bit disappointed in the social security legislation in New Zealand,” said. Dr D. Daiches Raphael, who has lately resigned from his position as professor of philosophy at Otago University, in a broadcast talk last night. He was discussing whether New Zealand had come up to the expectations he held three years ago, when he accepted his Dunedin appointment, and his answer to this question was a terse: “ Broadly, yes.”. - He had found the general social atmosphere at least as good as he had anticipated. “ I was glad to see a decent basic wage, good standards of housing, and, roughly speaking, as near an approach to equalitarianism as we are likely to get in this imperfect world. It was good to find the tram conductors talking freely to me abovit my job and telling me about theirs, looking on me as a potential friend and expecting me to reciprocate. All this, I think, is fine. “ But I must confess,” Dr Raphael said, “ that I was a bit disappointed in the social security legislation. The spirit behind it is rather different from what I expected: You see, in England, the Beveridge report was the response to a genuine and widespread feeling of wanting to make a better society—a spirit of idealism, if you like, though I do not want to exaggerate its extent. Now I had expected to find an even stronger spirit of idealism behind the New Zealand social security legislation, because that had not needed a war to bring it about. But. in fact, it seems to me, social security in New Zealand has a rather individualistic, almost slightly selfish, feeling behind it. Maybe I am doing New Zealanders an injustice in saying this. Anyway, I consider that the effect of social security is, on the whole, good, though I do think some features of its adm’inistration weaken initiative and could be improved without any essential loss of the overall advantages.”

The relation of the New Zealander to the State was a very interesting one, continued Dr Raphael. He was far less suspicious of State interference than the Western European was apt to be, far more ready to turn to the State when a job needed to be done. This difference of attitude was not due to any deep-seated difference of temperament but was, he thought, purely the result of historical and geographical facts. A certain amount of central planning in New Zealand was inevitable and there was no dark history to give warning of the dangers of too much control. “ So the New Zealander takes Government control for . granted, and whenever a new task is called for he looks to the Government to take it on. I don’t think the causes of this are appreciated by those people abroad who describe New Zealand as a ‘laboratory of social experiment,’” Dr Raphael said. “A laboratory is a place where you try out experiments with the idea of using them outside on a large scale if they are successful. Now. if you jigger about with a chemical in a test tube, it behaves in the same way as it would In a large container. But that's riot true of people. Social institutions that work in New Zealand won’t necessarily work in other parts of the world where you don’t have the same conditions repeated. The social conditions peculiar to New Zealand are a small population -in a good-sized and highly-productive country, as the. result ’of which New Zealand has to have a certain amount of central plannihg and can afford expensive administration.”