A DOUBLE MIGRATION

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 86, 8 October 1921, Page 4

A DOUBLE MIGRATION

The discussion oo British migration to -Australia will at any rate do good by driving home the fsy:t that redistribution of population is an Imperial necessity. Australia as an empty country is interested vitally (in the full sense of that word) in haying population; and Britain, as a manufacturing country, is interested vitally in having the Dominion^ fully manned for the supply of food and raw material. Britain will therefore find it advisable, perhaps necessary, to provide money or credit for migration to the Dominions, and for the works of rural development that must go hand-in-hand with such migration. Developmental work, in the way of opening lands for settlement and providing roads and railways to them, is as necessary to migration as are ships, because the task of redistributing population is, a double one. In the first place, people must be removed from the heart of the Empire to the Dominions ; in the second place, people must be removed from the cities of the Dominions to the rural lands. There is therefore a problem within a problem, and a real migration policy must plough the lands as well as the seas. When Empire capitalists fully realise how greatly they require more manpower in the Dominions, and more man-power on, Dominion soil, the money will'be found for a comprehensive scheme of migration-cum-dev«Jopment. And when the big landowners of the Dominions' realise that the Pacific is a wartheatre, and that the only insurance for their own property is closer settlement, they will contribute out of their own pockets. An example of the latter spirit is the proposal of the New South Wales Graziers' Association to voluntarily subdivide their surplus lands. '