POPULATION IN DEFENCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 70, 24 March 1937, Page 8

POPULATION IN DEFENCE

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Being one of the audience who listened very attentively to the earnest and able address of the Hon. W. E. Barnard during his endeavour to launch an enthusiastic .Wellington branch of the New Zealand Five Million Club, I: crave the courtesy of access to your columns to comment thereon. The impression given is that the New Zealand Five Million Club was born during a sudden crudescence of panic over the lamentable fact that the birth-rate in New Zealand has declined to a point bordering upon national disaster. Now, sir, this decline of the birth-rate is not peculiar to New Zealand. The trend is practically world-wide, oul> side of the U.S.S.R. Our greatest need, population, here in New Zealand, is also the greatest need in Great Britain, with its falling birth-rate, too. Yet it is proposed to institute a migration scheme comprising, if possible, young married couples with one or two children, now resident in Great Britain, to populate New Zealand with the requisite number, said to be five millions, of Anglo-Saxon stock to make New Zealand safe for New Zealanders. Statistics show that the same limitation of families, to within the economic capacity of low-earning power parents, is practised to, virtually the same extent in the British Isles, as her e in New Zealand. Taking the white population .of the Empire as a whole, it appears to be merely an attempt to transport consumers of "New Zealand exports from one hemisphere to another without increasing the number. It is a reinforcement of civilian married battalions to a weakened strategic point of the Empire. We have, and rightly so, to provide our own adequate defence measures. Laying stress on the word "adequate," it is beyond our financial resources to compass this; just as it is beyond our capacity to obtain any useful percentage of the desired five million by natural increase, because of the barrier of family economic stringency. Quality, and not quantity, is possible, not the two in conjunction, until the cost of nurture, adequate family protection, education, and equal chances for all, are fairly met by the community, which, professedly, needs the numbers for security, but is not prepared, to foot the necessary bill to obtain it.

While the British. Fleet remains in being, the Union Jack will still float over New Zealand, as in the past. If that untoward (though not impossible) event should come to pass—the shattering of that "sure shield" under whose bulwark we have been secure for well-nigh a century—it is immaterial whether our population be

one and a half, five, or ten million. We should inevitably have to bow the knee to any nation which considers itself capable of throwing down the gage of battle to another powerful Pacific nation whose democratic ideals parallel our own, and those of other units of the Empire, and to whom; by virtue of the time factor, the Empire must look to stand shoulder to shoulder in a time of mutual need—a true and real alliance of the English-speaking people and its corollary—democracy.—l am, etc.,-