Maori Growth Rate Problem

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30677, 17 February 1965, Page 14

Maori Growth Rate Problem

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, February 16. The Maori growth rate, of between 35 and 4 per cent a year, presented New Zealand with perhaps its greatest and most exciting challenge in social and economic planning since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Professor W. D. Borrle, Otago-born professor of demography at the Australian National Univer. sity in Canberra, said at the science congress today in a general symposium on the South-west Pacific.

“If not the greatest, it is certainly the most urgent challenge,” he said. The Maoris were the one group of native peoples in the South-west Pacific for whom population control did not appear to be a necessity. Most of the islands of the area were approaching the limit of their economic resources. While their populations were growing at high rates.

Emigration was one answer to keep work forces stable, he said. Any plan would probably mean the removal each year of from 12,000 to 14,000 people, including families.

The only way to avoid the need for emigration on such a scale was the immediate, widespread and drastic application of birth control. But no island government seemed likely to advocate drastic measures to reduce fertility, nor were the Maoris, in spite of their close association with a European population well versed in birth control, likely to provide an example for their island cousins. "Furthermore, birth control could not affect the short-term problem, which arrises from the fact that

almost half the populations are under the age of 15 years and have to be given productive employment or sustenance. “The sensible course would seem to be to encourage a combination of a modest level of emigration and family planning. If emigration is sought by the island governments as a solution, Australia and New Zealand will be forced, as Pacific countries themselves, to consider their special responsibilities in the matter,” he said.