SOUNDING A NATIONAL ALARM

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 302, 17 September 1936, Page 10

SOUNDING A NATIONAL ALARM

“The purpose of this booklet is to reveal the nature of the disaster which threatens New Zealand.” Thus Mr. A. E. Mander on the first page of a new booklet, To Alarm Netv Zealand (Wellington: L. T. Watkins, Ltd.). The title is in keeping with the method of treatment. Both in his style of writing and in the extent to which he employs typographical aids to emphasis; Mr. Hander conveys the impression that he has set out to try to shake us into national wakefulness. The ground for alarm is the slow growth in our population, a growth which, as an economic writer pointed out in The Dominion some months ago. will if it continues at the present rate cease altogether about 1942. and give place to a decline. The New Zealand birth-rate in 1880 was 41.2 a thousand of the population; in 1935 it was 16.1 a thousand of the population; in 1911, when the total population was one million, there were 26,354 babies born; in 1935 when the population was more than one and a half millions, there were 23,965 births. Since 1922, our population has increased by a quarter of a million, but the annual number of births has decreased by more than five thousand. Taking into account all the women in New Zealand between the ages of twenty and fortyfive, about fifty years ago there was one baby to every four women; to-day there is one baby to every eleven women. These are typical of the facts with' which Mr. Mander bombards his readers. The occupation and development of territory is a question either of right or of might. If might be the only right, he argues, surely we need a much greater population in New Zealand to develop the might to defend it. But if there be some other sort of right, can we claim its authority to justify a million and a half people holding New Zealand to the exclusion of all others? We might feel safe, he thinks, if we were increasing our population by a hundred thousand annually. I o accelerate natural increase, he suggests propaganda and subsidisation, instancing Germany and Italy as countries where systematic and vigorous propaganda is being carried on to induce people to have larger families. As to subsidisation, Mr. Mander makes a point which is often overlooked by glib politicians when they are extolling the virtues of a high standard of living. “An increase of income,” he says, “does not in practice lead people to have more' children—unless it is made conditional on their doing so. The basic wage, for example, is expressly calculated to support a man, wife and three children. But a man obtains the same wage whether he has the Children or not; and he is just as likely to use it to support himself and a motor-car —or (partly) a brewery—as he is to support three children. Indeed there is a strong incentive to him not to have three children, since by having them he will deprive himself and his wife of other things, motor-cars, books, holidays, the standard of living they have previously enjoyed ”