REHABILITATION PROBLEMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 20

REHABILITATION PROBLEMS

Australian Officials Study -N.Z. System

EGINALD MARSH, who as Controller of Rehabilitation in the Commonwealth Employment Service is one of the Australian delegation of five which has been touring New Zealand to study "otir rehabilitation scheme, thinks we have a great country. He has been heard to confess a preference for Wellington Harbour over Sydney, is full of admiration for the men whose rehabilitation he has been studying, is astonished (as.a one-time farmer) at our lambing percentages, and says he had to come to New Zealand to appreciate-"the two best-known lines of our Banjo Pater- " And he sees the vision splendid Of the sunlit plain extended which came to his mind when he drove over the hill from Governor’s Bay to Christchurch in the early morning and saw the Canterbury Plains for the first time. Before the war Mr. Marsh was a schoolteacher, running a mixed farm as well, and he was thinking of dropping

the teaching when the war broke out. He joined the RAAF. as a wireless air operator. After some changes, he became one of the original officers of an R.A.A.F. Rehabilitation Section, inaugurated in 1941, which laid the foundations of Air Force demobilisation planning. He left the Air Force to take his present position, and in June of last year he was seconded to the Ministry of Post-war Reconstruction as Executive Officer of the Central Demobilisation Comniittee responsible for planning the demobilisation dispersal centres through which men of all services passed on their way out of the Forces. As one of the R.A.A.F. Rehabilitation Section and as Air Force Member of the Inter-Services Demobilisation, Planning Committee, Mr.’ Marsh studied what was being done in Canada, England and the United States, and he interviewed Australian airmen "from Jerusalem to Western Canada," to help take a census of the whole personnelto find how man would need training on their release, and what kind, how many would want houses, how many

would want flats, how.many would want to go on the land, and so on; and’ to discover how these different sections were distributed in their"home districts in Australia, so that the best locations for certain training centres could be determined. Happy Coincidence "That work was extraordinarily interesting," he told The Listener. "In the final result we were able to see how the men’s education and their previous employment were related to each other, how their post-war intentions tallied with their previous experience, and all kind of things. It was amazing how many wanted to use their deferred pay as a deposit on a house. "And we were able to estimate roughly, from Air Force figures, how many men, apparently qualified to do so, wanted to go on the land afterwards. We found that the number of men from all Forces’ who on their own evidence were experienced in farming, came to

55,000. And the Rural Industries Commission, acting independently on evidence it collected for itself, estimated that there was room in Australia for 54,000 men to go on the land. That was an_ interesting coincidence of figures.

"And how is that working out now?" we asked. "Are you able to get farms for them?" Mr. Marsh explained that because six different sets of State legislation were required after the Commonwealth legislation went through, there was some unavoidable delay in getting the land settlement scheme working, but in his opinion it had been a delay with advantages. For one thing, he said, since the possible number of farms was limited, it was better that there should not be too many discharged servicemen settled on the land while others equally eligible were still serving in the Forces; and the delay also gave rural industry the chance to settle down after the abnormal conditions of wartime. Last year Mr. Marsh was fully occupied with the planning and operation of the Commonwealth demobilisation plan. It had been planned to release 3,000 men a day from the Forces, and to effect this, at the dispersal centres, the medical boarding, vocational guidance and X-ray resources of all the Forces were pooled, while civil departments supplied members of their staff so that a man being demobilised could get everything attended to on the spot. By June of this year (nine months after demobilisation began) 500,000 men out of a total of 580,000 had been demobilised. "Re-est." and Rehab. : There is a marked distinction in terms between our scheme and Australia’s, Mr. Marsh also told us. Over there, the general term for what we called "Rehabilitation" is "Re-Establishment." "Rehabilitation" in Australia is one phase of

"Re-Establishment." It is the reconditioning of the physically unfit. So unless the Australians have resorted to talking about "Re-est." they are deprived of the convenience of our colloquial word "Rehab" (which has the virtue also of making people pronounce an "h" that is usually mute in the full word). In New Zealand, Mr. Marsh said, he had been deeply impressed by the way the actual work of rehabilitation had come "right down to the local community" and the way the Government had given certain executive powers to local | districts. Australia, he said, has hundreds of local repatriation committees, which are advisory, and function as a kind of "big brother" to the returning man, These communities are comparable with the local rehabilitation committees in New Zealand. "The calibre of the men who are doing rehabilitation work here has impressed me, too," he said. "They have their feet right on the ground, and they’re keen." | Our level of employment was another point specially commented on by Mr. Marsh, "I should say your employment figures here have never been equalled anywhere," he said. "I thought Australia had the lowest level of unemployment. Our Australian figure for men_ drawing unemployment benefits would be about a-half per cent. But I under--stand your figure is even less than that, whereas in U.S.A. the figure is about 7 per cent. and even in Sweden (a neutral | country with a traditional high level of employment) the figure over the last two years remained at about 3 per cent."