Aid to Islands urged

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33100, 15 December 1972, Page 2

Aid to Islands urged

New Zealand would do more for Pacific Islanders by providing financial assistance in their homelands than by allowing them to migrate to New Zealand.

This is one of the suggestions put forward by the National Development Council report on population and migration.

“Properly administered di-

rect financial assistance can aid a far larger number of people in their homelands per million dollars spent than the same outlay on the capital and other costs of absorbing a migration inflow of people without adequate education or skills,” says the report. SOCIAL HELP Direct assistance to the islands in an attempt to encourage their peoples to stay at home would also help to reduce social problems in the Islands and in New Zealand. The report recognises that some Polynesians — from the Tokelaus, Niue, and the Cook Islands — have New Zealand citizenship and cannot be prevented from migrating to New Zealand if they want to. But it emphasises that many Islanders have problems of adjustment in New Zealand and need special assistance, especially with housing and education, if ithey are not to fall behind I the New Zealand average. It also recognises that the | groups which tend to migrate to New Zealand — those Islanders who are young and ambitious — are the very people which the Island societies need. JOB OPPORTUNITIES

“With particular reference to the Cook Islands and Niue, a positive regional economic development programme aimed at creating jobs in the islands could provide a realistic alternative to migration to Auckland,” said the report.

New Zealand has no special responsibility towards Westen - . Samoa which has been independent for 10

years, but about 1500 migrants come to New Zealand from there each year. The report says migration to New Zealand cannot solve Samoa's economic and population problems. Over the long term, New Zealand’s policy should be to increase financial and technical assistance while giving Western Samoa greater access to trade, even at the expense of opening the New Zealand market to products from the Islands, such as textiles, which would be in direct competition with New Zealand manufacturers. AID IN N.Z. The report recommends that greatly expanded assistance should be given to Islanders already settled in New Zealand. “Such a policy will be very expensive,” it says. “Indeed, the high costs involved are one of the major reasons for preferring, where possible, adequate economic development in the Islands. “But increased assistance (including family-planning services) to Islanders within New Zealand would seem to be necessary if the social problems of having an underprivileged minority in our midst are to be avoided.”

New export.—Fresh milk, produced and packed in Waikato yesterday, will be on sale in a Noumea supermarket today. The Waikato Milk Company yesterday filled what was believed to be New Zealand’s first commercial fresh milk export order. Thirty gallons, packed for the New Zealand Dairy Board, will be flown to Noumea this morning.—(P.A.)