Failed

Where Nz Has

In Cook Is.

Letter to the Editor IN your June issue there was an article (page 111) about the emigration of Cook Islanders to New Zealand.

This problem is one that should have been brought to the attention of NZ House of Representatives long ago. Unfortunately, few of New Zealand’s politicians have any idea where the Cook Islands are, and fewer still have any interest in the Group.

The present Cl Administration is undoubtedly more far-sighted and progressive than any of its pre decessors, despite somewhat ill formed allegations to the contrary.

The problem of emigration to New Zealand by the Cook Islanders is disturbing the Administration; but without the co-operation of the NZ Government, it is powerless to stop the drift. The natives hold full citizenship rights and are there fore technically free to go where they like. Such is the reductio ad absurdum of the modern fetish of Human Rights.

Apart from supplying NZ with cheap labour, I very much doubt if this emigration is beneficial to any one. A sadly large majority of the Islanders who return to the Group after spending a few years in NZ are a sorry advertisement for it.

Certainly, none of them return better off financially than when they departed.

An ambitious minority of natives believe that they will be able to acquire a technical training in NZ that is denied them in the Islands.

A number of them are anxious to see their children have the benefits of a NZ education. Had any fore sight been shown by the NZ Gov ernment during the past fifty years, a training college would have been established in the Islands long ago.

This would have been in accord ance with the policy of the British Colonial Office in Africa and else where.

The present Administration is struggling to raise funds for the construction of Tereora College, in Rarotonga, which will eventually cater for educational and technical needs. Until this college is com pleted, the Group will continue to lose its younger generation by in discriminate emigration.

As the Maori leaders themselves point out emphatically, such emigra tion is postponing the day when the Islands are capable of govern ing themselves, and therefore pro longing the burden of the NZ tax payer, represented by annual sub sidies for the Cook Islands.

It is an ignoble reflection on New Zealand’s capabilities as a colonial administrator that, after fifty-odd

years, she has failed to implement a scheme for technical training of the natives, and is still compelled to send highly-paid clerks, plumbers, carpenters and electricians to the Cooks.

By comparison, the oft-ridiculed British Colonial Office, during the same fifty-year period, brought law and order to the Sudan, trained doctors, judges, agriculturists and engineers, and has now handed back the country to the Sudanese people themselves. It is an example which I wish the NZ politicians would take seriously to heart.

I am, etc.,

Ronald Syme.

Rarotonga, Aug. 4.

H Mr. G. Loschmann, of Tahiti, who has been resident in Wellington, NZ, for some years, returned to Tahiti with his wife late July, en route to Raiatea, where he will take over the management of the late Mr. J. E. Wigmore’s property. Mr. and Mrs. Loschmann planned also to visit Mr. Loschmann’s brother on Tetiaroa atoll near Tahiti. if Mr. Cornelius Crane, of New York, owner of the yacht Vega, who recently acquired the property of the late Mr. Harrison-Smith in Tahiti, in the Papeari District, has now bought another valuable Tahiti property formerly owned by Princess Takau Pomare Vedei.