OPPORTUNITY FOR MIGRATION

Otago Witness, Issue 3672, 29 July 1924, Page 26

OPPORTUNITY FOR MIGRATION

INVESTIGATION IX NEW ZEALAND. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, June 17. A special commissioner of the Daily Chronicle has been visiting Australia and Mew Zealand with a view of ascertaining from personal observation wliat opportunities these countries otter for migrants, and what class of migrant is most welcome. Mr Fenton Macpherson, the commissioner in question, has contributed his first article, and thi3 deals with his arrival in New Zealand. The perfect organisation of tha Migration Office is one of his first observations. “I was specially impressed,” he says, ‘‘by tho kindly, considerate way in which the migrants were treated. There was an entire absence of fussy officialism. .Each family or individual was interviewed separately. Each was listened to patiently. Where advice was required it was given frankly. Where assistance was necessary it was promptly forthcoming. ‘‘The quiet-, methodical, individual manner in which everything was done, the way in which all difficulties were anticipated and immediately smoothed away, revealed a very close liaison between the Migration Department of the High Commissioner's office in London and the Chief Migration Office in New Zealand. In something unden a couple of hours some 400 migrants, including about 90 children, had been personally informed that telegrams had been despatched at the Government expense informing their relatives, friends, and future employers of their arrival. They had also learned when and where they would be met by their relatives, friends, or employers, as well as what provision had been made for their future. Furthermore, they had received railway tickets franking them through to their ultimate destination in North or South Island. In addition, they had been enabled to consult, if they desired to do so, a New Zealand representative of their own religious organisation. “'1 had seen these same migrants come aboard the Rotorua at Southampton during a blinding rain storm on a bleak March day. After nearly five weeks voyaging, during which they had had plenty of fresh air, had been well fed, and comfortably housed, I saw them going ashore improved in health and physique, and in many cases, greatly increased in weight. Everybody ashore was so radiant, so friendly, so genuinely glad to see us that those aboard, saloon passenger' or migrant, could not help but feel that they were, each and every one, being personally welcomed both to Wellington and New Zealand. For myself, 1 shall never fonget that charming, spontaneous, unrehearsed, collective welcome that came from the quayside crowd at Wellington. It was a lightning revelation to me of the friendly, genial, warm heartedness of the New Zealand nation—a people who seem to me so endued with a spirit of almost scriptural hospitality that strangers about to enter their gates feel they are being received as honoured guests.” In a. second article the same writer remarks that what most migrants from the Old Country discover first on landing in New Zealand is the sun. “They are sheered and stimulated by it,” he says, “refreshed and invigorated. They realise that they have come at last to a Land of Sunshine. There can be no little doubt that the sunshine with which the dominion is so constantly flooded is in no small degree for the general good helath of its population, which is so remarkable that for years the death rate has been the lowest in the world. “No thoughtful observer can fail to be impressed by their well-laid-out towns.,” the writer goes on to say, “their splendidlyequipped ports, their gigantic national scheme for the application of their inexhaustible stores of water energy to the provision of electric power, light, and heat for general domestic and industrial uses throughout the dominion, their plenitude of laboursaving appliances, their extensive use of machinery in all branches of farming and other primary industries, as well as thenscientific handling of the problems connected with the cultivation of the soil and the raising and selection of stock. But it is not on the individual industry of its people alone that New Zealand depends for its present and future prosperity. Coupled with that individual industry there is the collective spirit of co-operation, which is so phenomenal a feature of its economic life. “It is just possible that the rapid development of the co-operative spirit has been in some measure duo to the unselfish readiness to help others which is so characteristic of New Zealanders generally. Were they a selfish people nationally it is highly improbable that they would have declared so early in their career as a nation their determination to reserve the opportunities afforded by their country for people of British stock alone. For. that momentous decision too much honour cannot be paid to the New Zealanders who made it. That decision and all it has meant for the safety of the Empire explains the care with which the New Zealand authorities select from anions intending migrants only those who are likely to become good citizens of the dominion. “As a New Zealand-born ex-soldier put it very bluntly: ‘We don’t want to waste the big opportunities our land affords on those who cannot make the best use of them We are an A 1 nation, possessed of an A 1 country, and the only migrants we have room for must l>s A 1 folk.’ ”