New Zealand at Work

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 114, 29 August 1941, Page 4

New Zealand at Work

\ X 7E draw attention on another page to a sefies of broadcasts started last . week under the general title New Zealand at Work. The purpose of these broadcasts, like the purpose of our article, is to make New Zealanders aware of developments on their own industrial front that are every day becoming more sensational. If we abstain from calling them a revolution, that is chiefly because revolution is an overworked word. There are of course people in New Zealand who think, or at least say, that New Zealanders do not know what work is. BeCause we no. longer work ftom daylight till dark we are told that we are loafers; as we ceftainly are if the clock is the only test. So is the woman who makes a shirt in an hour or two with a sewing machine instead of sitting up half the night to finish it by hand, the farmer who shears his sheep with machines, or even shaves himself with a razor and not with a shafpened shell. The cow is a loafer that fills her belly in an hour or two in a clover paddock and then lies down to fuminate. The very bees are loafers that gather their honey there. There is in fact nothing in New Zealand that lives that does not live more easily than the same thing in harshet countfies, and if the test of work is the time it takes, and the virtue of work the amount of discomfort it causes, we are neither a diligent nor a fortunate nor a healthy community; and never can be. But we have no néed to hang our heads if the test of our diligence is the quantity and quality of our output. Most of us know that our farmefs produce enormous quantities of milk, meat, butter, cheese, and wool-a stupendous quantity if we measure it against the fact that all the farmers in the country could be billeted without much inconvenience in ofie of our larger cities. But few of us know how rapidly, when the call came, our secofidary industries wete switched over to.war production, and to what extent already we are independent of outside supplies. We do not know because we have never been told, and now that we are being told, it is difficult to believe. The purpose of these talks is to help us to believe.