Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 1943. YOUTH AND PLANNING.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 April 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 1943. YOUTH AND PLANNING.

“T HAVE never spoken to more interested and intelligent r audiences,” Mr I 'J. W. Mawson, Town Planning Officer to the Department of Internal Affairs, is reported to have said in telling the Canterbury Manufacturers’ Association that he had just finished a series of talks to secondary school pupils and training college students in Christchurch. Mr Mawson added that the coming generation ■would know more about the social and economic aspects of the city than their predecessors.

Although it casts a definite reflection, and one that appears to be well justified, on the present generation of responsible citizens, the state of affairs described by Mr Mawson is one on which far-reaching hopes may be based for the future. That the unspoiled mind of youth, alert and unprejudiced, should appreciate readily and at their full worth the advantages to be derived from town planning and from the application of similar methods to other branches of community and national development, is no doubt, natural.

Unfortunately it is as well established that what passes for practical experience tends in this country, and probably in others, to incapacitate a great many people for anything else than routine and accustomed procedure and, by breeding timidity or stifling initiative, makes them oppose doggedly and obstinately any bold change in practice or method, however well it may be recommended by reason and good sense, and even by example. It is impossible to account on any other ground for the total neglect or painfully arrested development of some obviously desirable reforms.

A serious neglect in New Zealand of regional and town planning is conspicuous in this category. So too is a persistent, though largely unexplained opposition to a related reform—the comprehensive reorganisation of our cumbersome and out-of-date system of local government. Government after government in this country—including the one at present in office — has essayed the task of local government reform, only to be brought to a standstill by the dead weight of largely parochial opposition.

Mr Mawson’s references to the intelligent and interested hearing he got in his talks on town planning to secondary school pupils in Christchurch are of broad and practical significance as they bear on the treatment in coming years of community problems and affairs. Even those of us who assume that we must at present be content to deal with these problems and affairs in a halting and rather confused way should be very willing that our successors should be giveii every opportunity and encouragement to approach the duties of citizenship in a more active and enterprising spirit.

The Masterton Borough Council, for instance, appears to shrink apprehensively from a boldly constructive planning of town development, and to be committed to a hesitant and tinkering treatment of the problems involved. It has to be admoitted, too, that there is little enough indication of any inclination on the part of the community in general to spur the council on to a more purposeful policy. It is possible that the council and the people whom it represents might in these circumstances derive a measure of comfort from doing something to foster the objective and orderly study, in our secondary schools and perhaps even in the higher classes of primary schools, of the fabric of our system of local government, as it stands and. in the rather obvious extent to which it is capable of being improved upon.

A good deal might be done in this way to strengthen the hope—a hope that exists in any event—that considerably higher standards in the administration and management of community affairs will be set in the years that lie ahead than are being attained at the present day.