POLICY AT GENEVA
DOMINION OUT OF STEP NOT SO POPULAR AT HOME ROTARY HEAD’S VIEWS The opinion that New Zealand was not held in as high esteem among responsible persons in England to-day as she w*as at one time was expressed by Mr. F. C». Hall-Jones, district governor of Rotary, in an address to the Invercargill branch of the League of Nations Union.
Mr. Hall-Jones said that New Zealand, by her attitude to the League of Nations, had put herself in an invidious position. There had been difficulties in British politics and in the League of Nations Union in the Old Country, and English people had learned to orient their minds to the situation. We had not done that, and New Zealand had stood out on her own in a manner that had caused embarrassment. At the Geneva Assembly some resolutions arose that were rather stultified by a saving clause that had its origin in the New Zealand attitude.
The speaker quoted the following extract from the Round Table:— “Although the particular character of the Abyssinian affair caused South Africa to lean toward a stricter view of sanctions than most of her fellow members, it was really only New Zealand who stood athwart the main trend of Commonwealth thinking about the future of the League; she alone sought to intensify its coercive and punitive functions. It seems a fair guess, therefore, that the saving footnote was inserted at the instance of the New Zealand Government and was couched in general terms to preserve the facade of uniformity and to avoid admitting that of the six independent Governments one was out of step on this issue. The result is that a great deal of the effect of the report is destroyed.” This attitude had led to the raising of the serious question whether there could not be a foreign policy for the British Commonwealth less one Dominion. That question summed up the whole situation.
"So you see,” Mr. Hall-Jones said, “there are considerable grounds for the lack of favour in which New Zealand is held to-day.”
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/PBH19371029.2.13
Bibliographic details
Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19468, 29 October 1937, Page 2
Word Count
345POLICY AT GENEVA Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19468, 29 October 1937, Page 2
Using This Item
The Gisborne Herald Company is the copyright owner for the Poverty Bay Herald. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of the Gisborne Herald Company. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in