PILLING EMPTY AUSTRALIA

Evening Star, Issue 17766, 14 September 1921, Page 8

PILLING EMPTY AUSTRALIA

A CHURCHMAN’S SCHEME. SHOULD TAKE MILLIONS. The Rev. Canon Pughe, director of emigration for the Church Army in England, an organisation interested m the settlement overseas of tho best type of British citizen, arrived in Sydney on August 30. Yes (he told a ‘Daily Telegraph’ representative). ho had heard of Sir Joseph Carruthers’s scheme, but where Sip Joseph would be satisfied with one million at present, ho wanted many millions. There is no limit to his dreams and hopes, and were he dictator of Australia there is no doubt he would have a land of millions, fed from the granaries of our own land, and running with milk and honey. Canon Pughe understands farming, and when he speaks of Australia’s agricultural possibilities it is with knowledge; and, what is more important, he knows the tremendous difference between conditions agriculturally in England and here. “You cannot,” he remarked, “expect well-positioned English farmers to leave the conditions of their island home and come into the mighty spaces of this country. That is too much.” The canon is an optimist who, while seized with tho difficulties of populating the country, contends that they are not insuperable. Rather the other way. They are easily surmountable. “ Let us,” says he, “ take a wider view of the emigration question than simply opening the back door to the domestic and the farm gate to the agricultural laborer.” This picturesque definition of Australia’s immigration policy was rather tickling to the Australians listening, and onward the enthusiastic canon went in his survey of the problem from tho English and Australian point. The Church Army, he said, felt that the building of a nation was the biggest of tasks, and there was no doubt that in the next two years it would be the biggest question tho Cxunmonwealth and,tho Empire would have to face. “ The peopling of Australia is the largest shield for security, and it will be impossible, in tho face of the world soul which has awakened since the war, for Australia to keep her present large territory unoccupied. The best safeguard for peace is to see that within the next ten years we have people coming to these shores, not in their hundreds of thousands, but in their millions.” The interviewer, whose mind was filled with the gloomy predictions of a financier on the boat and knowledge of Mr Storey’s difficulties in raising a loan, wondered where the money was to come from to finance tho sceme.

HOW TO GET THE MONEY. The canon was not surprised at his questioner’s concern. He said ho had suggested to the Prime Minister in London the possibility of influencing the English Government to forego Australia’s war indebtedness of £38,000,000, on condition that Australia spent for the next ten years £4,000,000 a year in settling British people on Australia s vacant lands and in populating the country in other directions also. “This will,” emphasised the canon, “pledge Australia to continuity of purpose. Australia wants a continuous immigration policy, and not one that will be affected by any change of Government. If we wish to keep the yellow man out we must bring the while man in,” he concluded.