Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1942. INDUSTRIES IN COUNTRY TOWNS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 September 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1942. INDUSTRIES IN COUNTRY TOWNS.

JTYERY eneourageemnt should be given to the Minister of Ilousing (Mr Armstrong) to carry out the ideas he expressed a few days ago in regard to fostering and assisting the establishment of secondary industries in country towns. An impel tant part of the encouragement that is needed ought to come fiom the people of the country towns, but any methodical examination of the question must lead to the conclusion that it is frpin the broadest standpoint in the national interest that a varied development of industry should be extended into the rural and provincial areas of the Dominion.

Apart from the fact that there is wide scope in this country for new industrial development, no one, taking an unprejudiced view, can feel satisfied with much that enters into the presentday development of our metropolitan areas. In this as yet thinly populated country, we are tolerating the development in a few metropolitan areas of conditions of crowding and congestion which tend increasingly to parallel some of the worst aspects of life in the overgrown cities of older lands. No intelligent regard for human welfare is shown in the cramped conditions in which large numbers of people live in Wellington and in some of our other cities.

As the Minister of Ilousing has said, living and working conditions, especially for families, can be much better in smaller towns than in cities. At the same time the extension of industries into rural areas offers some advantages from the point of view of establishment and organisation. It is of the highest importance, too, that a wide extension of secondary industries would lend itself readily to the co-ordination of these industries with primary production—for instance in permitting labour, where the need arises, to switch from one to the other in accordace with seasonal or other demands.

In the after-war period an enterprising expansion of industrial production and population is likely to be, for this country, the only alternative to poverty-stricken stagnation. There should be no thought of contemplating this development in any other conditions than the best, from the standpoint of life and work, that the Dominion can be made to afford. There is everything to be said for breaking away, from the policy of huddling people uncomfortably into crowded and congested metropolitan areas and offering to all workers and their families the benefits of open and healthy living. There need be no difficulty about providing in progressive country towns all the desirable amenities that are supposed to constitute the attraction of city life, but from which a large proportion of the people who live in our cities in fact are in great part debarred.

Under the conditions of industrial development that have prevailed thus far in New Zealand, the so-called drift to the cities might more accurately be described as a drive to the cities. Family life at its best is broken up, because young people reared in country towns and rural areas go to the cities in search of the employment they cannot find in their home districts. It is not by any means to be taken for granted that they always go willingly. In any case their exodus is enforced by an organisation of industry which embodies obvious and serious defects. It is possible to improve vastly upon this state of affairs by establishing industries in and within reach of country towns and also by extensions of small farming. These last might well be associated closely in New Zealand, as they are in the United States and elsewhere, with the development of manufacturing industry.