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Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 282, 25 August 1944, Page 4

It is unfortunate that in the discussion by the Secondary Schools Qonference on the question of deferred salary increases, suggestions of a teachers’ strike should have been introduced. Such methods, as employed by the “pressure groups” associated with militant industrial unions, no doubt have had effective results upon a timorous Government, but they are to be condemned as anti-social acts. Apart, however, from this aspect of the discussion by the conference, the association’s case for salary increases, as argued previously, rests upon a reasonable basis. In a word, the teachers were promised something in 1921 which they did not receive. What it is now proposed to grant is something which had not been submitted to their representative association beforehand, and which they now refuse to entertain, mainly on tlie grounds that the increases proposed are altogether disproportionate to the circumstances of .the case, and that the low salary scale is likely to result in a deterioration in the quality and efficiency of entrants to the profession. On these grounds the case is quite sound enough to stand on its own merits and deserves more favourable treatment than the department and the Government have yet been prepared to give.

New Zealand’s health year for 1943 was marked by certain “outstanding features,” states the Director-General of Health, Dr. Watt, in his annual report. Those were, a fall in the birth-rate, a fall in the deathrate a rise in the infant mortality rate, and a continued improvement in the maternal mortality rate and the death-rate from tuberculosis. There is reason for gratification that the incidence of maternal mortality and the death-rate from tuberculosis is showing an encouraging downward tendency The adverse trend of the birth-rate, which dropped last year from the 1942 figure of 21.73 per thousand to 19.70 per thousand is no doubt due to existing abnormal conditions conducive to a fluctuating tendency. The rise in the Infant mortality rate from 28.71 per 1000 live births in 1942 to 31.37 last year gives cause for some concern, however. Taking the fall in the death-rate over the same period—from 10.60 per 1000 to 10.01— the meaning of the trends revealed is, nevertheless, that tho condition that wo have been frequently warned about, namely, that New Zealand is in danger of becoming a nation with a preponderance of old people dependent on a shrinking proportion of younger people, still exists. It is a condition which, if it persists, is certain to have ultimate serious repercussions upon our national economy and welfare, In particular, it must Inevitably throw the Social Security Scheme off its financial balance, unless the growing disproportion of the age groups in relation to the total population is corrected by a substantial increase in the birth-rate, and a fall in the infan mortality rate.