Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 1920. THE DRIFT TOWNWARDS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIII, Issue 1716, 6 January 1920, Page 4

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 1920. THE DRIFT TOWNWARDS.

Is referring to the Federal elections yesterday we drew attention to the anomaly which permits of such largo concentrations of population in the towns and cities of Australia, to the detriment of the country at 'largo. Three out of every five persons resident within the Commonwealth have their abode within urban limits, while immense tracts of country remain undeveloped and unproductive. Australia, with an area of 2,97-1,581 square miles and a population of something over five millions, has a density of only 1.69 persons to the square mile. There are portions of “the great lone continent” carrying less than one person to every 16 square miles, and others again in which there is only one person to every four square miles. The country is crying out for development, and could bo made one of the greatest fields of production in the world. Its development is, however, retarded, by lacls of population in the -rural districts. The cities are huge overgrown places, which produce little or nothing, and which largely depend upon the country for the foodstuffs which maintain them, and for the raw products they utilise in such manufacturing industries as have been .established. The most unfortunate feature, of the whole business, however, is that it is the favoured worker, living and working—when ho chooses to work—in the city who tells the country what its producers shall, or shall not do, and who dictates to the bush “cocky,” and the squatter alike, the terms and conditions upon which he shall employ labour, and the return ho may himself receive for his producebo it grain, wool, meat or dairy produce. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the farmers of Australia should have at last united to secure the direct representation of their interests in Parliament. But they are obviously handicapped by reason of their numerical inferiority. In four of the States—South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales, over 40 per cent of the total population is located within the capitals—s2.B9 per cent of the South Australian population in Adelaide, 50.57 per cent of the Victorian population in Melbourne, 42.43 per cent of the West Australian in Perth, and 41.07 per cent of the New South Wales population in Sydney. Brisbane houses 26.09 per cent of the Queensland, and Hobart 19.87 per cent of the Tasmanian population. That this metropolitan concentration is phenomenal may be readily seen, if a comparison is instituted between the Australian figures and, the percentages for the capital cities of Europe; Copenhagen, which carries 20.29 per cent of the population of Denmark, heads the list, and only three other capitals (bn the 1911 census) show more than 10 per cent of the country’s population resident within their boundaries—London, with 12.54 per cent of the population of England, Dresden with 11.41 per cent of that of Saxony, and Christiania- with 10.11 per cent of the population of Norway. Australia’s future is so largely dependent upon her productive powers, and upon the development of her primary industries, that this state of things cannot prove other than embarrassing to'her Governments, whoso chief concern it should' be to increase pi'oduction in every possible way, and to discourage the growth of the cities at expense of the country*

•■ / . THE NEW ZEALAND POSITION; The tendency in Australia is rather in the direction of a decline in the rural population, the people flocking to the towns and cities, which possess greater attractions to, the mass of people than the simplicity of country life. Here, in Now Zealand also, there is a marked tendency in the same direction, a greater expansion being visible in the population of the lour centres winch carry more than a third of the population of the country, while if the mue ‘‘suburban areas”—-Gisborne, Na- 1 pier New Plymouth, Wanganui, Pal-; merstou North, Nelson, the _Urey Valley boroughs, Timaru and Invercargill—are included, the population of these thirteen centres is approximately half that of the country at large. Within the last twenty years the population of the New Zealand* boroughs has ad- : vanccd by approximately 10 per cent at the expense of the rural areas. Thus, m 1896, the population of the countries represented 55.69 per cent of the total of the Dominion, and that of the boroughs 43.69 per cent. In 1916 (according to the census returns of that year) the proportion was 53.24 in the boroughs per cent in the countries, each census period being marked by a decline in the country percentages, and an equivalent rise in those of the boroughs. The question naturally arises: Is it possible to stem the drift of population townvvards, or, alternatively, to so increase the influx of population into the rural districts as to remove'the growing disparity between the town and country populations? Wheat-growing, and „cropping! generally, are manifestly on the decline, and other of our rural industries are because labour is not offering on terms and conditions that the average farmer can afford to give. Even with our “country quota” operating, the representation of the country districts is gradually "passing into the hands of the urban population, for there are not more than a dozen constituencies in New Zealand, at the outside, where the town voters do not turn the scale against the rural voter. And, while this state of affairs continues, wo must expect to find that greater attention is paid to the wants of urban than to those of the rural constituencies. Australia’s policy lin'd or its Labour Governments has been dominated by an outside caucus. Today wo publish a cable voicing the complaint of Mr W. G. Higgs, deputy leatter of the Official Labour Party, that its failure at the recent elections is due to the interferences of that outer a»d irresponsible caucus, and asserting the necessity for the liberation of the Parliamentary Labourites from its control. Side by side with it comes the uncompromising reply of the president of the Australian Labour Party, who vetoes the suggestion that the Parliamentarians should seek an alliance with the Farmers, as “it is essential the. Labour Party should remain free and untramnielled.” The caucus, for which this unnamed president speaks, is dominated by the 'revolutionaries, whose last thought is of the farmers, or of any class but themselves. In this country wo shall do well to hang on to every safeguard that conserves the producer’s interest, for if wo establish conditions under which production becomes more or loss unremuneratiye, the whole country will suffer. The people who are clamouring for a change in the existing system of representation are those who‘have given the least thought to the inevitable consequences that would follow the change they advocate.