BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, JUNE 21, 1948 ARE WE PRACTICAL?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 58, 21 June 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, JUNE 21, 1948 ARE WE PRACTICAL?

Laying the foundation-stone of the Auckland Electric Power Board’s new building at Newmarket the other day the Gover-nor-General, Sir Bernard Freyberg, Y.C., paid tribute to New Zealanders as a “practical people.” “If you give them a sound policy and start them on the right foot, they can usually be relied upon to find a sound solution to any problem,” he said. That compliment is one of which most New Zealanders will be proud, and, to a degree, justly so. It has always been our boast that we have a goodly share of initiative and common sense. The very conditions under which our young nation has developed have made those qualities necessary parts of our national character. However, there are ways in which we have not harnessed that essential practicality to best advantage. Our common sense is all too often negatived by our easy-going lack of interest in things that should interest us most vitally. Though the New Zealander is one of the most inventive, practical creatures on this earth, he is also one of the hardest to arouse to a really vital interest in anything, except football, horse-racing and an occasional war. He is easy to impose upon and, though he will fight to the last ditch for freedom if told- to do it on an international basis, he shows little concern about frequent incursions on his freedom right here in New Zealand. Though moved almost to tears by tales of Britain’s hardships, he is not sufficiently practical in his sympathy to arise in his masses and demand that something be done right now about things like the Mountpark dispute. Daily he reads in his newspapers of hopelessly inadequate housing in New Zealand. He knows how quickly Army accommodation was rushed up for war purposes, yet has not the common sense to demand with an insistence that cannot be denied that the same all-out effort that was made to destroy enemy assets and lives in war be made now to create New Zealand assets and preserve healthy New Zealand lives in peace. This practical New Zealander calls his country God’s own country, yet tolerates selfish, factional squabbles ihat cut down the national efficiency and are anything but God-guided. He has sense, he is practical as an individual. But in the mass he just doesn’t care enough about anything to find a solution to the vital problems that beset his country today.