Eisteddfod Entries

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 83, 6 May 1949, Page 3

Eisteddfod Entries

Following is the other winning speech and the successful poems of the recent W.I. Eisteddfod at Edgecumbe. The Otakiri speech was'published Wednesday. The Whakatane speech tackled the problem from a different angle. The question of the advisability of child imigration has been on the minds of many of us since war first brought to our notice of war orphaned children and it is a question which demands our immediate consideration and decision.

In Britain today there are thousands of children of all ages now in the wards of various institutions, there are children living in the slums of the cities their parents incapable of rearing them properly under existing conditions of cramped quarters, poor nutrition and worse education by which I mean the education in ' good citizenship and then too there are children in more fortunate circumstances, but constitutionally delicate who cannot thrive oh the low food ration appertaining in Britain—and these children deserve a new life and a better one.

But England is not the only country which would welcome a chance for its orphan, its undernourished, and its underprevileged little ones. No indeed! Multiply the problem of Britain one hundred times and you will have some indication of the state of affairs in Europe now. Not only are the children undernourished, underprivileged and orphaned, but they are living in their thousands without hope of alleviation and more, tragic still without love—and affection is that rare and precious commodity without which a sensitive child reaches adulthood, vicious and unmoral quite unfit to rear a future generation.

This then is the material wiffch which a country with room in its land and in its heart has the opportunity of saving. Our country with barely two million of population could house to its advantage a million more. Not that I am suggesting ladies that a million children be gathered together and dumped willy nilly on these shores—what a ridiculous idea—but with due thought and planning surely 200 children debarked here every six months for the next five years would give us by 1955 apprentices to trades, industries, commerce and the land well worth having. For we would have by their ten years acclimatised to our conditions, our traditions and our way of life. In short we would have 5000 young New Zealanders of promise.

We are all aware of the chronic shortage of manpower in commercial life in New Zealand today. Nearly every branch of it is suffering acutely. And the farmers, the key to the wealth of this country—their position is perhaps in the most distressing state of all without going into details we have only to pick up our daily papers to read of the steady decline in primary production—and the reasons—we all know it—lack of assistance on the farms. But you all realise these things only too well.

The point I wish to make is this *—what is the best and' surest way of improving our manpower problem?

I believe it is child imigration. I do not think the mass importation of adult workers would prove a particularly happy or permanent solution. One good reason is the housing situation with which we are not concerned in this discussion, but the salient point is that adults are not generally easily adaptable to new conditions and a new country. Children given loving homes would be part of this country by the time, they were old enough to earn their livings. This then, is my case for child imigration. We have on the one hand thousands of little childen along in England and Europe waiting for their God-given right of a home and loving care. We have on the other hand a country with as yet untapped sources of wealth waiting for the manpower to release it. What then shall we do about it—ladies let us welcome child immigration.