The Press TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1955. If We Want People

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27566, 25 January 1955, Page 10

The Press TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1955. If We Want People

Anyone who still thinks that New Zealand needs only to open wide its doors to receive the pick of the world’s best migrants—by common consent in this country working men and women of British stock—may be shaken out of his complacency jby a report from London by the I special correspondent of the New Press Association. Accord;ing to the correspondent, the Prime Minister, on his arrival in Britain, will be advised of the failure of an advertising campaign to recruit men vitally needed to fill vacancies in the Dominion’s Works Department and railways. Without these extra workers, as departmental reports virtually admit, essential and urgent development works—notably hydro-electric stations—will be delayed and important transport services will be jeopardised. Engineers and skilled technicians such as the Ministry of Works desperately needs to keep its hydroelectric development programme up to schedule are also keenly wanted in other countries. The New Zealand Government has increased the salary scales of such officers in recent years in the hope of attracting qualified men to this country and of holding those we already have. But obviously other countries are bidding higher. New Zealand will eventually have to raise its bid, even at the risk of upsetting accepted salary scales in other departments of the Public Service; for these men are, in the full sense of the word, indispensable to the country’s continued progress. The failure to recruit railwaymen in Britain is rather different; and it is certainly revealing. Much has been heard lately of the discontent of British railwaymen, who are officially acknowledged to be lowpaid workers in a depressed industry. Although they are leaving the British railways in hundreds, few, apparently, are attracted by the prospects of secure and reasonably well-paid jobs in New Zealand; and these are mostly married men with families, and therefore automatically disqualified under the Dominion’s highly selective immigration scheme. The report from the London correspondent will no doubt surprise many New Zealanders who think the attractions of life in New Zealand are too self-evident to need emphasis. The opinions of the young single men returning to Britain after* two years’ work on the Roxburgh hydro-electric project, quoted in an article in the ‘‘News Chronicle n , are not necessarily representative of the opinions of most prospective British migrants; and they are certainly less applicable to the immigrant’s life in other parts of New Zealand. But they are not to be dismissed lightly, however much the New Zealander may prefer the sturdy sentiment of the Harrogate man, returning to Britain after 43 years, who insisted that Australia and New Zealand wanted (and presumably, in his opinion, were entitled to expect) not persons looking for glamour but “men with “ a bit of the old pioneering spirit It should be clear to the Government and the public by now that New Zealand will get neither, while the present narrowly selective

immigration system is persisted with. New Zealand’s only hope now of securing a steady flow of British immigrants lies in opening the door to family groups as well as to single men and women. The additional strain on housing resources would not be intolerable—even, in the political sense—to a government very sensitive to public opinion on the competition of immigrants for the houses available. The Government, indeed, may find it necessary to defy this section of public opinion by setting aside part of its house construction programme to provide accommodation for immigrant families exclusively. After all, a little additional strain on housing is, by comparison, a soft and easy alternative to the breakdown of electric power programmes and transport 'services. If it has the will, the Government can win the confidence and the support of the people for such a programme. And if the Government and the people are willing to go so far, they may be willing, also, to do something about making life in New Zealand a little more attractive to those we hope

will settle here. Only the very perceptive New Zealander—or one who has travelled much—can understand how oppressively the country’s archaic licensing laws and inanimate Sundays bear upon the stranger in this strange land. The pioneering spirit is irked by nothing so much as dulness.