NEW ZEALAND’S POPULATION

Southland Times, Issue 25641, 7 April 1945, Page 6

NEW ZEALAND’S POPULATION

CHANCE TO SECURE SETTLERS By LT.-COL. SIR CLUTHA MACKENZIE Back again in Asia I had just finished my first breakfast when a High Court Judge joined me in a corner of the lounge. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I do want to hear about New Zealand. I retire in about a year and my wife and I want to settle there. We have a nice little place at home, but after so many years in the tropics—Jamaica, West Africa, Ceylon—England is too cold, you know. Would we find a warm welcome there, advice, friends, and that sort of thing?” I explained the situation that the Government had no plans to encourage settlement, though it was, of course, open to British people to come to New Zealand at any time. “Well,” he said, “unless we really felt that New Zealanders were glad to have us we should have to think of Italy, the South of France, Morocco, perhaps, but we would like New Zealand.” He had not been gone 10 minutes before a young naval officer approached rather nervously. “I hope you won’t mind, sir, but I am very anxious to know whether you think there would be any opening for a fellow like me in New Zealand. I am with the Fleet here, temporary, you know, on a meteorological job. In peace time I’m a mathematician. I want a university post. I’ve a wife, and we’ve two small babies—they’re at home, of course. We do want to go to New Zealand,” he concluded, with pleading in his voice, as if power over his whole future lay in my hands. All I could answer was that, if we in New Zealand took no active steps to increase our population from outside, openings in this field would be few and far between, but that, if we did set out to build up our numbers to, say, two million people, there would be many opportunities for men and women in every kind of profession and trade. SCOTSMAN’S INTEREST As I sat in a Royal Air Force transport plane, buzzing northwards over India, I was roused by a Scottish voice shouting in my ear. “I hope you won’t be offended, sir. I’m the navigator in this plane and I thought you wouldn’t mind telling me a little about New Zealand. You know I and my girl want to go there after the war ...” Back at my desk, among the first letters I opened was this from an Army major: “I want to go to New Zealand after the war. It is my intention to take leave soon to England where three of my sons are being educated, in order to arrange for the two older boys (17 and 15 years of age) to begin their technical training on the farming side, so that they will be fit to take on that kind of work when they reach New Zealand ...”

And so it goes on, day after day. Every New Zealander has the same experience. Our Government representatives in London and in India receive an unending flow of inquiries. It is my sober estimate that, provided the Government of Great Britain is willing, we can help ourselves to 400,000 of her best stock when the war is over, that is, 150,000 men and 250,000 wives and children.

We must, of course, lay plans for it now, for it is now, in the stifling afternoon hours in the Burma jungle, in the long night watches at sea, in the freezing cabins of bombers, homewardbound from their raids, that men are thinking out their futures. We know the difficulties and delays shipping and housing shortages will bring about, and that large-scale migration cannot just be achieved by saying “Come.” But practical planning is possible. Many men will be needed in the Armed Services for several years after the war, so that those who want to settle in the Dominion can postpone their discharge until the coast is clear, or they may fill in the waiting period with temporary reconstruction jobs at Home. In New Zealand, our own men will have to be demobilized, and a good deal of preliminary preparation made for the newcomers.

To the most unimaginative of us in New Zealand it would, of course, be a colossal tragedy if some scourge was to carry off 400,000 of our people. It would be a great personal and economic loss and a grave weakening of our already slender population. Though not so dramatic, though not full of the unhappiness of personal bereavement, the fact that we are refuging the chance to take 400,000 of Britain’s best is an equally great disaster—an irreparable one, a chance that will never recur. CROWDED ASIA

The swiftness of my journey from our young lands to old over-crowded Asia impressed me more than ever with the sharpness of the contrasts. In the evening I walked on the parched sands of an Australian desert, then a lonely night remote among the stars, and in the morning the sun was just lighting the checkered pattern of paddy fields and the feathery ranks of coconut palms as we slid down to our airfield in Ceylon. It is enough of a headache now to feed India’s four hundred millions, and almost annually there is a greater or lesser famine in an area where the monsoon has failed. Yet the population makes a jump of five millions annually. It will continue growing until it is five hundred and then six hundred millions. After that, if by then India has achieved prosperity and modern education, the birth rate may begin to fall but in the meantime—what? Ironically enough, I am one of the many workers who, by striving to spread education, medical services, sanitation, better housing and better feeding, are speeding up that rise in population. The same process, slowed temporarily by the war, is going on in China. Out of Christian humanity, under the high principles of the Atlantic Charter, 1 or by reasons of pressure of a less pleasant kind, we New Zealanders may see the day when, having declined to bring good British settlers to our country when we had the chance, we may need to open our doors to India or China. Why does our Government do nothing about it? The paralysis of narrow socialism is upon our country, stopping expansion, enterprise and pioneering dead in their tracks. The trade union leaders are fascinated by the brief butterfly brilliance of a unionists’ Arcadia. But it is only a selfish Arcadia, for themselves alone, and to that there is a certain Nemesis —if they will not share it with our fellow-humans across the Indian Ocean .and the Western Pacific. Indeed here already is what India is saying—the quotation is from The Statesman of February 26, 1945, a leading British-Indian journal: Dr Mukerjee emphasized that in the forthcoming conference of the United Nations the claims of the Indians and the Chinese for freedom of emigration must be pressed; for without this there could be no world peace nor freedom from want for 1,009,000,000 Asiatics, who were half of humanity, but now confined to only 14 per cent, of the globe’s surface. The acid test of the Atlantic Charter would be the satisfactory settlement of the Indian racial issue in South Africa and the revision of the White Australia policy ... It will also be in the economic interests of Australia to become an Asiatic island and rebuild her trade and industry into the economic structure of Asia. There will be greater peace and security for her as a member of friendly Pacific peoples than in her rigid economic dependence upon Britain.