WELFARE OF THE DOMINION,

Otago Witness, Issue 3993, 23 September 1930, Page 7

WELFARE OF THE DOMINION,

RESIDENT IN THE LAND.

ADVICE TO URBAN DWELLERS. WELLINGTON, September IG. New Zealand s economic welfare was dealt with by his Excellency the GovernorGeneral (Lord Bledisloe) when speaking on the subject “Town and Country” at the Rotary Club’s luncheon to-day. I am a convinced believer in Rotary 7,” said his Excellency. “It promotes sc rial intercourse amongst busy men, takes them for once outside their occupational watertight compartments, and by broadening their outlook adds materially to their happiness and their value to the body politic. The subject of my address is prompted by the New Zealand Shopping Week, so prudently organised in Wellington. In the present state of the country’s finances every prudent patriot should consider when he spends a shilling into whose hands that shilling will ultimately pass. If it passes into a local factory which is normally affording good employment to his fellow-countrymen, or, failing that, into the factory in any country like Great Britain to which New-Zealand sells her own primary products,-at least a penny of that shilling, perhaps a good deal tore, will come back to the spender one way or another.

No country s economic welfare, contentment, and happiness depends in these days, solely upon its own domestic activities,” proceeded his Excellency, “ but at least we can all add to the country’s security and our own prosperity and comfort by ‘ keeping our money circulating in the family ’; primarily in the home circle of New Zealand itself so f; as ones brother New Zealanders can supply one s wants, and so far as they cannot do so then in the families of Mother Britain and our Imperial cousins. If every New Zealander doggedly made this his trade objective he would be surprised at the rapidity with which the clouds of depression now obscuring the sun of industry and domestic comfort would pass away. Prudent Government finance is not the only road to national prosperity. Self-help is at least as important, coupled with clear vision and a sense of relative values.

Regarding industrial activities,” continued Lord Bledisloe, “ the greatest perils facing this Dominion in the future are, in the first place, too great a dependence upon the Government to undertake tasks which are more appropriate for individual enterprise and the employment of individual capital, and in the second place the drift of population from the countryside into the towns. The former threatens to kill New Zealand's personal initiative and sound industrial development ; the latter to kill New Zealand her self. It is up to the townsman to remember that his ultimate economic salvation lies not on his own urban doorstep, but in the fair green countryside where New Zealand's butter, cheese, wool, meat, fruit, honey, flax, and timber are being produced ; and up in the backblocks where the conditions are hard and life is strenuous, but where the vital spark of the nation is still aglow and the spirit of the sturdy, resourceful pioneer who laid the foundations of her economic structure barely 100 years ago is still determined and resourceful. There are pessimists abroad to-day, even in this land of sunshine, smiles, and human efficiency. The pessimist who most needs watching and rebutting is he who scents national bankruptcy in world over-production of land products. Constituted as she is climatically and humanly, if and when there is world over-production of lanu output, New Zealand should be, and assuredly will be, one of the very last countries to go to the wall. “ Pessimism,” concluded his -excellency, “is said to be the handmaid of national decline. It warps energy and checks initiative. Confident anticipation is indeed the life-blood of all industrial undertakings; but to none is it more essential than to those of the countr side, as there is an inevitable ‘ lag ’ in the financial recoupment of capital and labour expended in agricultural enterprises. This sense of future security can best be gratified by a consciousness of the rapid improvement which modern science, intelligently applied, is effecting in farm practice.”