"BACK TO MUFTI"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 278, 20 October 1944, Page 8

"BACK TO MUFTI"

But Rehabilitation Takes Time

be hearing more and more from their radios about Rehabilitation and what it means. We drew their attention last week to the first of a series of special broadcasts to be given on Tuesdays and Fridays at 7 p.m. in each case. These broadcasts mark the beginning of a campaign to make known to all service men or women who are returning to civil life the benefits and privileges that are available to them under the rehabilitation scheme. 7 | this week on, listeners will And from what The Listener has heard from an officer of the Department, something of the kind is needed. There are still,soldiers, it appears, who have been discouraged by critics of the scheme and have been. persuaded that it is not going to help them at all, while others have come to expect too much of it. One branch of the scheme where there has been a good deal of misunderstanding is the land settlement section. Some soldiers without farming experience have returned from overseas saying to themselves "I’ve been wanting to go on @ farm all my life-here’s my

chance," and have been annoyed to find that the Department will not assist them to get straight on to a farm unless they first take a course at an agricultural college or spend a period on an approved farm. Some of them, too, have been unable to realise that farms cannot be produced out of thin air-that the shortage of fertiliser makes it impossible for more land to be brought into production at the expense of the fertiliser supplies for existing farms, or that the Department is acting in the soldier’s own interests when it refuses to assist him on to a farm which will not give him a living wage and allow him to pay off his commitments. Loans have been another subject of misunderstanding. The State Advances Corporation does not have the final say whether a man shall or shall not receive a loan, and "security," as it is understood in the peacetime commercial world, is not necessarily the test for whether a. man may or may not borrow. If a soldier could produce real "security" any financial concern might advance him his capital outlay; what the Rehabilitation

Department demands to know is whether the man is really suitable to the job, and the job really suitable to the man. No Mistakes This Time What some critics have failed to comprehend, the Department emphasises, is that caution of this kind arises, not out of any need to keep the purse-strings tight, but out of lessons learnt after the last war. Australia, for instance, found that soldiers were not truly rehabilitated who had been allowed to go farming without a thorough test of their abilities being made; pressure of public opinion and organisations had pushed thousands of men on to farms. who should never have gone there. Knowing this, the Rehabilitation Department here has reduced a grading system to a matter of fing detail, and has had it operating for some time. These’ are some of the points of the . farm settlement plans; they avill be dealt with in more detail in the "Back to Mufti" talks, and so will all the other rehabilitation services. So for details, and news of improvements in the Department’s various schemes, tune in at 7.0 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays to one of the main national stations. The Tuesday programmes will be short dramatised sketches, the Friday ones brief statements on topics as indicated in the printed programmes.