Nelson Evening Mail TUESDAY. APRIL 18, 1944 LET US GET DOWN TO THE GROUND FLOOR

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 18 April 1944, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail TUESDAY. APRIL 18, 1944 LET US GET DOWN TO THE GROUND FLOOR

ONE disability from which the population issue suffers is that it is too personal to be made a leading plank in a political platform. If electors are told the birth-rate is falling and more babies are urgently wanted they know this is an intimate appeal to those who could and should have more children, but who deliberately put other things in life first. They are being asked to give, not to receive (though, if they only looked far enough, they would find the reward one of the richest this world can bestow) and calls for sacrifice are not popular in political manifestoes. Yet any group which seeks to be entrusted with the government of the Dominion and is squeamish about bringing this most vital of all national questions into the forefront of policy is only deluding the people it seeks to govern. How many New Zealanders are there who ask why, if population is so important, the Government has not taken up the problem in earnest by this time? Failing such action they argue there is no need for them individually to be very concerned about it. When challenged by such organisations as the Dominion Settlement Association, a large section of public opinion runs for the shelter of such complacency. The Government uses the rehabilitation screen of “our own first” as an excuse for not even thinking officially about migration, and the best answer Mr Fraser has so far given to those urging him to start the ball rolling is that, following settlement of our own service men and women, “a generous invitation will be extended to those of our Mother Country who desire to come to New Zealand.” No admission in that of the stark fact that we urgently need those people, that the initiative in encouragement should come from us, that they stfould be helped to get here and plans set in train now for fitting them into this Dominion’s economy when they arrive after the war is over. “Our own first” is a very proper principle of rehabilitation but New Zealand so far has refused to come to grips with the cold truth that this short-term activity is indissolubly linked with the much larger issue of reconstruction and expansion, which depends for its driving and sustaining force on more people up to the level of optimum population. People can come from only two sources: natural increase and migration. There is nothing more •fundamental in the continuing life of a nation than the lsftvs of biology and it is those ground-floor principles that we are cleverly trying to side-step in the quest for an ever-higher standard of living. Faced by the prospect of a declining population and all it portends. Britain has set up a Royal . Commission to endeavour to find answers to these two questions: 1. Why is Britain having fewer babies? 2. ■ Are married people deliberately i avoiding children or limiting their I numbers, and why? A very rep re- 1 sentative panel of members is going < to seek for evidence where it can J

best be found —among the married people—and its task is expected to Lake three years. New Zealand delegates duties to Royal Commissions and Select Committees. A Parliamentary Committee was set up while the House was in session to probe the whole Meld of local body administration. A Royal Commission has been promised on our liquor trade. Both are very worthy investigations which need to be made, but would anyone with a sense of relative values maintain that they should be given priority over the basic issue of a declining birth-rate and its implications? That, combined with migration, is the hinge on which future New Zealand will swing. Should it weaken or break down the rest of the questions which now loom large in the public eye will not matter much to our children’s children because they will all be governed by the fundamental one of people. If Mr Fraser returns from the conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers with his eyes unopened to this arresting and central fact his mission can be considered to have had one signal failure, whatever transient successes it may achieve in other directions.