A “YANK” LOOKS AT N.Z.—AND DOESN’T LIKE IT

Wanganui Chronicle, 5 October 1946, Page 5

A “YANK” LOOKS AT N.Z.—AND DOESN’T LIKE IT

New Zealanders who visit America may not have a particularly happy impression of the land of the Stars and Stripes, as was indicated in an interview this week by the “Chronicle” with Miss Beatrice Brown, a former resident of Wanganui, who visited the city after seven years spent in the United States, but Americans who visit New Zealand can also take a dim view of their new surroundings as the following illustrates. Entitled “New Zealand’s Uneasy Utopia,” a 6000-word article in the “Saturday Evening Post,” by Mr. Sydney Greenbie, formerly a member of the United States information service in Wellington, critically discusses many aspects of the Dominion’s life, with special emphasis on social legislation.

It declares that the cradle-to-the grave benefits have been wrung from the landed gentry’s profits, but that the planned replica of rural England is still no paradise. Mr. Greenbie says that Americans, who chafed under the pressure o£ America’s own complex industrial civilisation, liked to believe that New Zealand was a wyle-open, progressive frontier, self-sufficient economically, where one could renew the early American experience of pioneering and get on by ambition, muscle and grit. However, far from being independent and self-sufficient, New Zealand was in a dilemma.

New Zealand was founded as a purified replica of England, but nowfound that its people were too British for their own £ood, too agrarian and there were too few for industrialisation. Hence it was too dependent. The dilemma was whether New Zealand would look to Britain or America for its future well-being, or whether it must, in some way, become self-sufficient.

As a result of its restrictive immigration laws, which were designed to keep New Zealand for Britain, New Zealand has slowly distilled from the original mixture of the British Isles a kind of middle-class person—any standard Briton.

In face, future mind and taste New Zealanders were much alike. Everywhere there was the same face, comely and well-formed, but essentially plain, with blue eyes and brown hair.

Britons had brought to New Zealand one single, desolating uniformity; New Zealand, once a unique earthly paradise, to-day was a land of bare hills with flood erosion washing the soil info the sea. The famous social pioneering of New Zealanders was not an expression of highly-advanced social outlook; it was almost the inevitable result way in which New Zealand originally was set up in imitation of England’s landed aristocracy. New Zealanders claimed that in proportion to the human labour involved their animal farming was the most productive in the world. Therein lay the country’s social problem. Some 80,000 farm properties and twice that number of dependent workers could produce and process primary production which was the main source of livelihood for one and a half million. Whal were the remainder to do? This dilemma explained the fact that a half-frontier rural State, 95 per cent, of whose exports were derived from farm animals, was domi nated by a Socialist. Labour Government which was forced to pioneer in social legislation.

Mr. Greenbie says that, apart from Christchurch and Dunedin, there is little in New Zealand corresponding to the tree-shaded, open-fronted charm of the American town. Trying to make a life for themselves outside animal farming, by sheer numbers they were taken over by the Government.

The New Zealander was biologically standardised product, and in the resulting cultural uniformity there was little self-criticism and little awareness of other possibilities of living. The variety of change and stimulus on which American enterprise for ever flourished had no place among these self-satisfied people. New Zealand on the whole protected its people against life’s hazards more uniformly than America, but it. had to, because in New Zealand’s tight little world there were not many ways man could get out under his own steam. Mr. Greenbie concludes: “An American may be supremely happy that our own experiment, not only in political, but in social and industrial democracy, took a different turn from New Zealand's, but the more we understand why these people do what, they do the more we appreciate the spirit in which they are trying to work out their own salvation, and we may well be grateful for this little bastion of freedom in the South Pacific to supplement our own efforts to keep the Pacific fallow for democracy.”