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The Spike or Victoria College Review 1938

New Zealand's Future

page 32

New Zealand's Future

The people of New Zealand stand at the crossroads. Almost a century has passed since the founding of the colony. The story of those hundred years has, with the exception of several heavily censored pages, and a dozen or so pictures in which some figures are painted in colours just a little too bright, been dinned by hundreds of teachers into thousands of skulls. Our past is well known. But what of the future? What can one find, beyond idle speculation, to serve as a guide? More, what ideas has the University student of the future of his homeland? Has he sifted the real problems facing this country from the bogeys raised by our colonial press barons? They say you must diagnose the case before you can prescribe a remedy. Let us conduct an examination of Homo Novae Zealandiae.

The farmers, we are told, are the backbone of the country. Very true. Although a Certain Wise Man has remarked that they are also the wishbone and the funny-bone.) "As a nation we are dependent for our income upon the sale of our produce overseas." That's a much-quoted verse from the Bible, isn't it? Unfortunately it's true, true to the last pound of butter. It is also true that there are such things as slumps and depressions, and in spite of the excellent record of our Labour Government, we doubt if they can stop the farmer being badly hit by the next depression, now unfortunately well on its way. Until it has been proven otherwise, it must reluctantly be assumed that New Zealand is tied to a fluctuating overseas market, given to alternate booms and crises. The New Zealand man, the New Zealand student, knows only too well what that means to him. Insecurity. Insecurity of his job, of his bursary, of his freedom to speak, freedom to write, freedom to eat. "The Depression" is New Zealand Public Enemy No. 1.

The only way of cleaning up the last Glorious Mess which the Bright Brains abroad could think of, to get rid of the unemployed was to get them to kill each other. This simple but ingenious idea has several merits, one of them being that you have to Rearm to do this, and Rearmament encourages people to invest in industry. Then when the Weakest Player in the game can't go on rearming any more there's a war, and all the Unemployed are killed off. Only they are not called Unemployed any more. They have managed to get a job and are now just workers. Then they call them Soldiers just before they get killed. The scheme has defects, of course. You have to wait for a time after each war before you can get enough new material to "put up a Good Show." Another defect is that people, generation after generation, can't or won't accept the idea that this is a good way to run things. There's Another Way. New Zealand lost the best brains and the bravest hearts of a generation on the beach at Gallipoli. And today, the young farmer, the clerk in the Government, the University student, ask themselves, how long will it be, and where? The war clouds of Europe darken even Colonial skies. There are many who still remember—

"A hundred thousand dead,
With firm and noiseless tread
All shadowy grey and ghast,
And by the house they went,
And all their brows were bent,
Straight forward; and they passed, and
passed, and passed, and passed."

The flower of our nation, doomed to slaughter and be slaughtered once again?

New Zealand has its own Particular Problems too. The first is the Maoris. Almost every page of history that isn't referred to, every figure painted a little too brightly, has been treated thus, because it had something to do with the Maoris. The parts of New Zealand history which one doesn't mention ("Jolly bad form!") are all part of continuous narrative which tells how every device from the trickery of private individuals to open violence were used to get hold of the acres of what is today our finest pasture land. One half of the Story of New Zealand is how a great, intelligent, and kindly people were dispossessed, and reduced to a state of page 33 helpless dependence upon the charity of the Government of the day. By 1856, over twenty million acres of the best land in the South Island had been "bought" by the Colonial Government from the Maoris for six thousand pounds. By 1872, less than a quarter of that same land had been sold for over five million pounds.

Who can watch the Maori children at Rotorua, showplace of New Zealand, without a feeling of shame? And we can't even blame it on to sunspots. Getting the Maoris on their feet again is our own Particular Problem.

Our second Problem is the development of a national Culture, in literature, in art, in architecture, in thinking. Slavish imitations of everything British may have been legal as a beginning, but we'll soon be having a Centenary! Architecturally we seem to have come to a halt at the galvanised iron age. In the world of literature and art, apart from landscape representations, whether they be graphic or verbal, there is little that bears distinctive New Zealand markings.

The development of a New Zealand outlook leads to the question of New Zealand as part of the British Empire Much though it may be regretted by many, the fact is clear that the British Empire cannot, in the light of history, be regarded as a permanent structure. It would be the first in a history of 6,000 years of Empire if it were so. Signs are not wanting that its disintegration is already beginning. Read this, for instance:

"Those who look out on the Pacific feel that in Washington there is an instinctive understanding of their difficulties which they have laboriously to explain in Downing Street ... It often happens that when our Dominions look to us here, there is no sympathetic answer, no understanding, and they look to Washington, and Washington is not devoid of eyes and will look back at them." These were the words of Sir Auckland Geddes, in an address to the English Speaking Union at Manchester, fourteen years ago. A decade later the same idea is expressed by General Smuts, speaking to the Royal Institute of International Affairs. "The Dominions have even stronger affiliations towards the U.S.A. than Great Britain has. There is a community of outlook, of interests and perhaps of ultimate destiny between the Dominions and the U.S.A." Our ultimate destiny lies neither with Britain nor with the United States. It lies in the young people of New Zealand.

Economic collapse, slaughter on a vast scale, mark a dying civilisation—or what passes for civilisation. Until they are gone, the youth of this country will grow older under an impending sense of doom and their fears will be realised, as generation after generation "go to the Wars."

During the last three years great progress has been made in giving the Maoris the opportunities of life and learning for so long partially withheld. Signs are not wanting that a national consciousness is developing. The people of New Zealand have in three years grown to be one of the most keenly politically conscious peoples in the world.

Where stands the student? As he stands at the crossroads, is he uncertain, unable or fearful to face new directions? Does he know where he stands?

The next depression is on its way; the peace of Europe hangs by a fine-spun thread, already one quarter of the world s population is at war, and if the uneasy peace of Europe is shattered tomorrow, there will be war over almost the entire globe. The nations gather in their sinews and shrink back in alarm from the spectacle of the Frankenstein of Fascism, broken loose from his capitalist creators, shouting and smashing and killing.

One country stands aloof, a rock in a boiling sea. For the people of one country alone, depressions belong to the past. One country in the world today faces the future without fear, confident, assured. The country which decided to run things Another Way.

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That country paid the price of its liberation. We must pay ours, but intelligence can make it a much lighter burden in this country. It not only can; it must. There can be no going backwards. The future of New Zealand rests in the hands of those who are prepared to give the service of brain and hand to a quickening of the full realisation by the people of this country of the issues which confront them today.

But—

"Time is short,

And history may say to the defeated,

'Alas!'

But cannot help or pardon."

— A.H.S.