IMPERFECT PARADISE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 396, 24 January 1947, Page 7

IMPERFECT PARADISE

A Stranger’s View of New Zealand

| Written for "The Listener’ hv

IAN

STEPHENS

Editor of

"The Statesman" of ‘India.

AM an Englishman who has worked 16 years in India. There we find that visiting strangers may see our problems in refreshingly novel light. So readers of The Listener may be interested in my admittedly superficial views. I have ‘been here, on holiday, a month. In politics’ I am Liberal. This is my first experience of Australasia. Many things in this country I like. Others I like less or am puzzled by. My main dislike, or criticism, is that you are taking life easily, more so than the world’s tragic state warrants. It is a small world, much shrunk by modern communications; and as an eminent American has emphasised, it is "One World." Humanity, the globe over, has been put by science into the beginnings of compulsory partnership. Too Few People Only about 11% million people occupy your fertile, beautiful, temperate land. I came, by air, from a tropical country of 400 millions, a country of much suffer-ing-and of great latent abilities. It jis a sub-continent, now only about 2% flying days distant from you. Early last year, I spent some wecks where I was bred, in an island of New Zealand’s size and clime, but of 46 crowded million inhabitants. About the sufferings there, and the ‘abilities, you are more conscious than of India’s; yet not, my observation suggests, sufficiently. New Zealand, for decades, and particularly during the last one, has been much admired by _ progressive-minded folk, as an exemplar in enlightened policies and bold experiment. Some termed it a sociological lqboratory. "The workers’ paradise" it was called; "a paradise for the common man" is a moderner variant. As pioneers in humanitarian and social reform you have a great reputation to uphold. It may sag or collapse if New Zealand, self-absorbed and complacent, now enjoys her own temporary good fortune without proper regard for mankind’s acute ills elsewhere. Isolation, as any nation’s policy, was, never ethical; on a globe so contracted as ours nowadays has been by science, it is not practical either. Lots of Food Among the things I like here, immensely, is your food. I have not fed so well since holidaying in the pre-war England of ’37. I had forgotten how delicious milk and mutton could be. The mere existence of many of the other good things. you take for granted in your lavish daily fare had slipped from my mind. You have some rationing; but in my few

weeks’ stay I have hardly noticed it, have used only three coupons, and gained half a stone in weight. The quality of many foodstuffs in India is always poor. In Bengal, where I work, a war-created famine three years ago killed as many people, 142 millions, as your entire population, They were the helpless, ignorant poor, and they died in the Calcutta streets all around us. Ten months ago, in a bitter English March, I experienced anew, as earlier amidst exploding flying bombs in the summer of °44, the miserable meagreness and monotony of British rationed diet. As a tall man who likes open-air exercise I often went to bed hungry. These contrasts I may feel more acutely because I so like New Zealand people, and feel so naturally at home here. This has proved a very congenial country to me, which makes the difference from living conditions in the two other lands where I work and originate the sharper, You are astonishingly Eng-lish-with some improvements. You have less stolid reserve. The spontaneous kindness and good company here, the hospitality, the readiness to talk and befriend the stranger .are essentially English; but in the Home Country they show themselves mainly in crisis, as during the historic summer of ‘44. They were hard to find at times amidst England’s mood of evasive inertia in ’37, or of fatigue and disillusion in ’46. American kindness can also be wonderful, but some of it has an overwhelming, overorganised quality. New Zealand’s, in my experience, is charmingly genuine and unaffected. Good Looks I like New Zealanders’ looks as much as their manners. Perhaps you have fewer folk of superlative beauty in face or physique than a land so very lucky in diet and climate might be expected to raise. But the proportion of sturdy, well-built bodies, of cheerful, healthy, pleasant faces, of what might be termed good looks high in the medium grade, seems greater than in any country of five continents that I have visited. One query must be added, however: why are there so many false teeth? "Puzzling Distinctiveness" I greatly like your landscape. It contains unique qualities. At times I have been reminded, in your plains, of Southern England’s gentleness; your steep, _ sunlit mountain-sides suggest Italy, even occasionally the Himalayan foothills. There have been snowy Alpine moments, and moments on windswept, rain-washed tussocky grasslands recalling Western Iceland. But there remains something in this country’s topography, in the way your ground arranges itself, in the shapes and groupings of your characteristic trees and herbage, in your characteristically clear air, which has peculiarity, @

puzzling distinctiveness which etches itself on the mind. New Zealand’s scenery in jts way is unexampled, an experience which no traveller should miss.: I like your cities’ siting. Auckland and Wellington are as superbly placed as any leading towns in the world. That so much of them should have been built during history’s ugliest architectural century is bad luck. I like, too, your gaily painted modern bungalows, in countryside or suburb. Their paint would be coveted by many in shabby Britain today. But it seems odd that so many of these’ new structures are still built of wood and corrugated iron, perishable materials which often need repair and are -noisy to live in. Standardised Overseas News I like your Press. Its dignity, seriousness, and avoidance of sensationalism maintain the profession’s best traditions. Journalism’s basic job, as I see it, is to keep the people soberly informed by untwisted news and thoughtful comment, on big current events abroad and at home that may affect their welfare. That job New Zealand newspapers do well. The pooling and standardisation of your cabled news and transmissions seems however a drawback. If all papers take the same unified foreign service, a country’s Press lacks variety. Subject to that one however, I would regard New Zealand’s newspapers as the natural counterparts and full equals, not of the so-called popular London Press, much of which disgraces a great nation, but of the renowned British provincial newspapers or the better newspapers of India-a country which, though so different from New Zealand, is also very politically-minded. * The Big Problem: Immigration Because your Press is so good the dearth of items in it about what for me, a visitor, seems much your biggest problem is perplexing. Here I come back to criticism again, to the things I dislike or am puzzled by. That problem is immigration, Since I came I have read or heard occasional cautious -references to the need for augmenting your popula--tion. But dismally little seems yet to have been done; and the existence can be guessed of political forces set against } any major renewed immigration at all. This year, 5,000 assisted British immigrants, I learn, are at last arranged for; in '48-three years after hostilities ended -you may accept up to 20,000. Those appear small, belated figures. Before arrival, I assumed that the recently-ended Pacific struggle had convinced New Zealand, like Australia, of her ethnic peril and the urgent need for’ bold remedies, Around us, in uniform, on Indian soil during the latter part of the war, and scattered elsewhere about the globe, were scores of thousands of British lads of the finest type ready, because travel and fighting had unsettled their minds, to accept the adventure -éf life in any promising new country. That mood must now be fading. They are home again now, settling in, and New (continued on next page)

Imperfect Paradise

; . : . (continued from previous page) Zealand, because of housing and: shipping shortages, of the understandable wish to resettle her own Servicemen first, and perfaps also because of internal political obstacles, has done notably little to bend the unsettlement of adventurous. wartime British youth to her future advantage. Some of these shortages and obstacles are formidable, not wholly within your control. Nevertheless, coming as I do from my job amidst teeming Asiatic multitudes and assuming (as the available evidence suggests I must) that you remain opposed to Asiatic immigration, I sense here a great historic opportunity almost missed. Among India’s 400 millions are folk fully as talented, mentally and physically, fully as worthy of the best this globe can offer, as any Europeans; and those Indian millions are being increased by a further 30 millions every decade. China, Japan, Malaya, Burma, Indonesia must also be remembered. In Mr. Wendell Willikie’s "One World" there will be no room for ethnic vacua, for fertile lands under-populated and insufficiently developed because of unprescient or timid past policies. As in the fundamental problem of immigration, so in defence, New Zealand, to a friendly visiting eye, seems to be taking the short-sighted easier course. Britain nowadays is also under a Labour Government whose members once had pacifist traditions. Her postwar domestic strains, productive needs, and manpower shortage are much worse then New Zealand's, , Yet she fecls reluctantly obliged by the world’s still distressful, precarious state and the peace’s chanciness to maintain large armed forces by _ cofiscription. Here, the visitor finds with surprise, conscription has lapsed. The argument is heard, in explanation, that to put.compulsorily through military training a nation’s youth befote the shape of any future major war can be discerned is wasteful. That ds hardly convincing if not similarly acted upon by all nations. Holiday Paralysis The impression of a fortunately placed country not fully pulling its weight is intensified by your holidays. A stranger arriving in one of your towns late on a Friday with business ‘to do, like myself, is startled to find that nothing can be done till Monday. For two whole days in every seven, virtually all business in New Zealand ceases, your urban’ centres lie paralysed. Similarly a visitor. in’ December, like myself, is confronted, in your Christmas-New. Year festival, by an unstaggered summer holiday longer and fuller than anything in the pleasureloving 1930’s during Britain’s August holiday season. By it a big proportion of New Zealand’s factories, shops and places of commerce is put completely out of action for about three weeks. When so meny: things urgently need doing everywhere to relieve the loss and suffering from an unprecedented global war, so much holidaying here seems wrong. So, during my visit, seemed the piling up of vital exports through your _ prolonged waterfront dispute, and the evidence that even within your general 40-hour working week there is idling or skimped effort by some. Plainly it would be rash for a passing visitor to offer yerdict on a much de-

bated complex economic question: whether New Zealand’s main activity and source of wealth, farming, has been properly .balanced. with her. new industrial development. Reflection suggests that a country of small population, dependent chiefly on the produce-of her grassy fields, with poor internal. resources in metals or coal, may not=have capacity for some sorts of work in’ fac-tories-that your new industrialism, in fact, may prove in part parasitic. If sv, the parasitism will in part: be blameworthy on the 1930-33 slump, After so shocking an experience then of collapsed world-prices for farm produce, it is Understandable that New Zealand should strive to widen the range of employment, to take some eggs out of the one hazardous rural basket. But however your industrial | programme may work out, it. s€ems a serious national weakness that so many of the farming community, still the most important producers, should. remain in unreconciled opposition to your Labour Government-a Government moreover that has lost some electoral support lately, and contains curiously few young men Social and Racial Justice Another problem on which a stranger fesIs a diffidence in commenting is your domestic racial one. Though the claim may be right that New Zealand has done better than any country in avoiding injustice and intolerance based on colourprejudice, relations between the numerically preponderant whites or pakehas and the Maoris do not seem, from hasty observation, so idyllic as some literature suggests. That last year’s general election left so deliccte a balance between your two chief political parties, with the Maoris in the position of makeweights, may temporarily worsen matters. But they are not bad. Plainly. social and racial justice, to an impressive extent, has already been won in New Zealand. In sharp contrast to the huge, diversified, tragic country I work in, in contrast too-even nowadays, under its new Labour Government — with’ the island where I was born, New Zealand has few inequalities, and is "practically without rich or poor. Self-reenectine, middlingly prosperous, éasy-going citizens walk your streets and fields; good people nearly all-but perhaps rather too much alike in thought and. habits. There lies my concluding criticism. T think I discern in your admirably — unstratified society one curjous flaw. Perhaps it is socialism’s inevitable outcome, perhaps a special consequence of your history. By comparison with the British public, New Zealanders seem in some ways conventional. For. the unorthodox, the. social nonconformist, ‘the eccentric end the solitary, there is probably . less scope here thar in Britain. A friendly visitor’s views have now been set forth frankly. New Zealand -is no Utopia-though nowedays- sume optimists in less happv, war-ravaged lands suppose so. It has diverse imperf:ctions, mankind everywhere being imperfect. But it is a very delightful piace to be in nevertheless, certainly among’ the most favoured on earth in these times. To this particular visitor it has’ given the pleasantest, fullest, most refreshing holiday he has enjoyed for 10 years."He is grateful; and would like, some dav, to (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) return. For many sensible folk whe do ‘not expect from life the unattainable, New Zealand-in the phrase of a philosopher of the continent I work in, as interpreted by a poet of the land of my birth-could prove, whether as holidayground or home, "Paradise enow."