THE CIVIC SPIRIT

Hokitika Guardian, 10 April 1931, Page 2

THE CIVIC SPIRIT

SHOWN IN ADVERSITY. AN EXAMPLE AND APPEAL. (Contributed): There are potentialities for a great deal of effective work in a committee recently set up in Christchurch by the Canterbury Progress League, Tills new body is known as “The Unemployment Research Committee,” and its primary object is “to seek avenu es of useful and productive employments, and to suggest to the Unemployment Board desirable schemes of employment, with the idea of avoiding, a« far as possible, wasteful expenditure on unproductive work and to divert isuch expenditure into channels of employment that will make for increased production, ei».” Working on these lines, the Committee (the /personnel of which comprises 16 representative and influential citizens of the Cathedral City) has already initiated investigations for important drainage, irrigation, and treeplanting proposals, and is soliciting t] w co-operation of local bodies in these schemes for absorbing the unemployed. In this way it should become a very valuable alley to the Local Unemployment Committee. If similar committees could be established .in other centres of th e Dominion, and were actively supported hy the leading business men, their influence would most probably very soon be discernible in improved trade and industry. A vigorous civic spirit has always btvn a feature of life in Canterbury, and ,lhe present adversity nnoears to have added to its vigour. Emulation elsewhere, combined with complete efficient co-operation between jttjal bodies, local unemployment commit tees, the Unemployment Board and citizens generally, would most cert duly prove effective aids to a return to better tim"«.