DEVELOPING NEW ZEALAND

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIX, 29 January 1936, Page 7

DEVELOPING NEW ZEALAND

IMMIGRATION SYSTEM ADVOCATED BRITAIN AS MARKET FOR CANNED FRUIT A properly subsidised system of immigration and the organisation of the fruit-canning industry, with Great Britain as its' chief market, were two suggestions made by Mr Arthur Smith, of the Bradford City Council, who is in the Dominion on a holiday tour, in an interview with the Christchurch “Press”. “A point I would like to suggest to New Zealand is that I have been very much struck with the wonderful climate and growing conditions for all kinds of fruit in abundance, and there seems to me to be a great opening for the organisation of the canning industry. Britain is importing increasing quantities of canned fruit from South Africa and Australia, and it seems that you could develop that side vonr fruit industry very profitably. “I have been strongly impressed with the great potentialities of this country,” said Mr Smith. “The main thing von want is increased population. I would like to suggest when, as I understand, the trade agreement between New Zealand and Britain is revised shortly, that you try to come to an arrangement for a well-organised and properly subsidised system of immigration. The days of haphazard immigration are certainly gone, but I do think that if the Governments got together they could evolve some sort of sensible scheme. Each Government would have to have a system of mutual contribution, and it would have to be a method of land immigration. “From what I have seen of New Zealand there seems to be any amount of land not thoroughly worked. It belongs to somebody by name, certainly, but there must be a tremendous lot capable of much closer cultivation. England at the present time has more people employed than at any time in her history, but if we had a normal flow of emigration, unemployment at Home would solve'itself. Immigration would not add to New Zealand’s unemployment problem, because you have scope to develop yourself. New Zealand is capable of carrying another five or six millions comfortably.”