Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1943. INDUSTRIES AND WELFARE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 March 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1943. INDUSTRIES AND WELFARE.

J-JEARTY approval and support should be given Io the action taken by a number of members of the House of Representatives —a numerous group'representing all parties—with a. view to inducing the Government, in its rehabilitation and post-war policy, to encourage the decentralisation of secondary industry. A committee has been set up by these members which will collect relevant information and then lay it before the Government. This is a very good beginning, but it is desirable that there should be, as Mr AY. J. Polson suggested in the House recently, a scientific survey of the present and potential development of both primary and secondary industries in this country. What has to be determined is not merely what reasons can be found for establishing industries in fhe smaller towns rather than in the congested cities, but where and how, at the broadest view and taking full account of the factor of human welfare, industries may be developed with maximum advantage to the Dominion and its people. A primary condition of the successful and profitable prosecution of an investigation of this kind is a resolute jettisoning of preconceived and fixed ideas which have worked out badly. It has been suggested by a Wellington commentator that the theories of economists, technicians and other experts may be in conflict with hard realities and that “the fact must be remembered that industries arc not founded on theories, but on well-tested business principles, and influenced mainly by the factors of raw materials, transport, markets, power supplies and population.” There is, of course, such a thing as defective theory, but sound theory is the only foundation on which stable and efficient industrial development can be established. It is wandering a long way from realities to suggest that industries are founded inevitably “on well-tested business principles.” Here and in other countries many of them have been founded in a decidedly haphazard way and to the accompaniment of a vast amount of incompetent blundering, waste and loss. What is needed, in any case, is a dispassionate examination of the field of existing and potential industrial development in New Zealand —an examination conducted with an eye to the promotion of national welfare. A great deal of trained ability, well armed with technical knowledge, must be brought to bear upon an investigation of this kind if it is to serve its purpose effectively and there can be no question of the layman attempting to anticipate its findings. There are, however, certain commanding facts which merit attention in New Zealand if only as reasons for instituting such an investigation without delay. One of the chief of these is that city congestion everywhere has its unpleasant and undesirable features and that large cities, allowed to grow unchecked, become nothing else than a cancer in the national economy and body politic—places in which humanity withers away. That the evils of city congestion are at what might be called a tentative stage in this country is not- a reason for ignoring or neglecting them until they become much more serious. It cannot but be encouraging to the members of Parliament who are interesting themselves in the decentralisation of secondary industry in New Zealand that both in the United States and Britain, a good deal has been done in the way of distributing factories over the countryside, sometimes in association with rural industry. An immediate and enterprising inquiry into the possibility of fostering development on these lines in this country certainly is well worth while.