Ariyoshi Is Emerging as a Policy Maker

Every Sunday, "Back in the Day" looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.

For openers, George Ariyoshi is saying, Hawaii has gone far enough in terms of its rapid economic development.

And it has grown way too fast in term of people — if Hawaii solves any of its problems, there must be a leveling off.

Since Statehood in 1959, he continues, State policy has concentrated on building a healthy economy.

"Now we have this.

"And we have a chance to stop and look, and to see how we want Hawaii to move into the future."

This is Ariyoshi talking in an interview, closing out his first year at Lieutenant Governor — as the Governor’s close-in No. 2 man.

He is talking policy, a role he has assumed increasingly in recent months, and a role he seems to relish.

In the early months, there was his put-down of legalized gambling, his generalized plugs for ecology ("pollution is not an imagined but a real threat"), his defense of the outwardly unconstitutional residence law for welfare.

But in recent months Ariyoshi has been speaking out more frequently, and zeroing in with more consistency — on controlling, directing and planning growth in Hawaii. As in his series of recent speeches:

» Advocating the widespread dissemination of birth control techniques.

» Advocating lower limits on federally regulated foreign immigration.

» In a more radical vein, urging a federal look at limiting migration among the 50 states, which is both political and constitutional dynamite.

» Urging dispersal of people from crowded Oahu to the Neighbor Islands.

» And not only saving rural life but revitalizing it: through new communities, by creating "agricultural preserves," by cutting tax valuations on agricultural land, and diversifying agriculture.

Ariyoshi is saying: He is convinced that many people really want a rural setting — despite the continuing tide moving into Honolulu. …

Ariyoshi talks in a clipped, staccato-like way, but easily.

"I think now there is a strong feeling that Hawaii must be basically agriculturally oriented."