SYSTEMATIC COLONISATION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21308, 13 April 1931, Page 9

SYSTEMATIC COLONISATION

BIG IMMIGRATION SCHEME ESTABLISHING RURAL COMMUNITIES. ( Special to Daily Times.) WELLINGTON, April 11. An ambitious plan to establish rural communities, and even cities, in New Zealand and other parts of the British Empire has been promulgated in England as part of a five-year scheme for surmounting the pressing economic difficulties of the Old Country, and has aroused some attention in this Dominion. The promoters of this five-year plan, who claim influential support for the idea, propose to reduce tie unemploy-. ment dole by 10 per cent., and apply the saving to emigration—not mere individual emigration, but the kind of systematic colonisation by which New Zealand and tjhe other successful colonies of the British Empire were originally peopled—that is to say, the planting of communities, “The dominions cannot afford to re-, ceive masses of people who may require support there just the same as they do here," the plan states. “ But they have room which the United Kingdom has not. Let the Government buy land in the dominions, using, so far as may be, existing institutions of high reputation, such as the Hudson Bay Company, to do the work, and for the rest setting up chartered companies.” The money for this scheme, or part of it at least, would be found by reducing the dole annually by 10 per cent., by capitalising the dole for five years, and persuading those dominions that could afford it to match their capital pound for pound. Leaders of men, of course, would be re- - quired to take the first 100,000 men to , each dominion. The year 1932 might well see the purchase of the land, the selection of the leaders, and the enrolment of the pioneers, who would go ahead and prepare the ground for the army of occupation which would follow. In 1933 the expeditionary forces could be despatched to those countries south of the line, and that to Canada would follow in April. During that year the pioneer work would go on, the dole would be reduced by a further 10 per cent., and- further recruitments would be arranged.

The real movement would begin in 1934, when the villages and young cities would have grown. The dole would go down another 10 per cent. These Empire emigrants would still be dependent upon the State, and would be allowed to remain so for two years after emigration. In the first two years the migrants would be all men, with the exception of the nursing service. In 1935 and 1936 the process would go on up to the full limit of those desiring to take advantage of it, and the proportion of women would rise during that time. The dole, by successive annual reductions of 10 per cent., and having been capitalised for five years, would be extinguished by 1936. It would be easily possible, the promoters claim, to transport 6,000,000 people in this way in five years, and their prosperity would create a vacuum both in England and overseas. Five years’ dole capitalised and matched by equal loans raised in the dominions would create new cities wherever it was intended to put them. The result, the plan claims finally, would be the ending of the dole, and such a wave of prosperity in all the dominions and the United Kingdom as would make the nineteenth century afraid for its laurels.