BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1948 REHABILITATING HOME SERVICEMEN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 51, 1 June 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1948 REHABILITATING HOME SERVICEMEN

According to an announcement by the Minister of Rehabilitation, Mr Skinner, home servicemen of long service are now eligible for certain types of business loans, up to a limit of £SOO, on the ground of service alone. Theoretically, home servicemen will ultimately be eligible for full rehabilitation assistance, and most of them will endorse the Government’s policy of helping the returned men to re-establish themselves first.

However, because of its re-' peated promises to see that noone would suffer loss of opportunity through war service of any kind, home servicemen will be quite justified in watching the Government’s rehabilitation moves to see that those pledges are carried out. There are some who feel that a little more help could have been given in regard to housing, for instance. While it is true that home servicemen of long service are now eligible for housing loans without the previous stringent test of hardship, it is also true that the men who need help with their housing problems most of all are often men whose service was not . long enough to qualify them for loan assistance and who, even if they could prove hardship, might find that their financial position was such that they could not afford to build at today’s prices, even on borrowed money. That applies particularly to those fairly mature family men who were drafted for service with the later reinforcements of 2 N.Z.E.F. and held back at the last on account of their familyresponsibilities, or possibly regraded medically. Those men believed they were going overseas. They were told they were. They acted accordingly. They sold homes, cars. Realised on their assets to make their families a little safer in case “anything happened.” Some wives gave up tenancies of houses and went back to their old homes to save the rent a business executive, professional man or skilled tradesman could afford but an army private could not.

True, Government financial assistance was available to those who were in debt, or tied to hire purchase agreements. It was not easy to get otherwise. After a year, two years, perhaps longer, those men came back and found there was not a lot of interest in their re-estab-lishment. There still isn’t.

They themselves would be the first to agree that they should not be given priority over men who faced death, wounds,, privations, at their country’s behest. But they are justified in saying they were prepared to, do just that. Had made arrangements for it.

They would be justified in saying that, so far as housing 3 is concerned, if a man’s family responsibilities are important enough to keep him away from the shooting, then they should be impqrtant enough to merit some consideration now. But the position is that those men are treated as civilians, with no regard whatever for. the fact that, during their service, they lacked all a civilian’s opportunities to feather the nest; no regard for the fact that many of them definitely suffered loss of opportunity in their callings, even though it might not fit the Government’s rigid definition of hardship.