POPULATION OF NEW ZEALAND

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 66, Issue 5600, 2 April 1943, Page 2

POPULATION OF NEW ZEALAND

THE DOMINION’S PROSPECTIVE SETTLERS

GOOD TYPES AVAILABLE

(By SIR CLUTHA MACKENZIE)

CALCUTTA, January 30 So many men in India and the Middle East had asked me about prospects of post-war settlement in New Zealand that in November, 1942, I sent a short article on the subject to several Indian newspapers with the object of discovering the real depth of the interest and the quality of the potential settlers. I advised against the immediate settlement on the land of inexperienced men from overseas and that, instead, they should be prepared to work as farm hands for several years before they bought property for themselves. I said, also, that if New Zealand would undertake a policy of general expansion, there would be room for men and women of almost all types of occupation. If the response was sufficient, I would represent the position to the New Zealand Government, and would also advocate the formation of a New Zealand Settlement Society, the function of which would be to welcome the new arrivals, give them frank advice, and assist them in every way to find a happy niche in their adopted country.

Prospects Reply The article brought me a mail of more than 500 letters. Their writers fall roughly into three groups. The first covers keen young fellows between 18 and 25 years—captains, pilot officers, squadron leaders, petty officers, young naval lieutenants, bombardiers, sergeants, corporals, aircraftsmen, gunners, and so on—anxious to make their homes in a new young country after the war. Some are married, and most intend to get married when the war is over. Through scores of letters run sentences of this kind: “What to do after the war has given me a lot of worry. Your article i£ Heaven-sent. It is the answer!” Unfortunately my article is but a tentative proposal. I wish it were within my power to reap for New Zealand this magnificent crop of British youth and vigour; but I am in hopes something will come of it.

The second group includes men between 25 and 45, highly qualified in the professions, business management, public administration, and holding responsible jobs of one kind and another. Some have capital, some have assured income—all have proven ability and wide experience. Most are married men with children. Their motives in thinking of New Zealand are to make a home in a pleasant British country and to bring up their children as New Zealanders. Many say how much they have liked the New Zealanders whom they have met on war service. A number have been in posts in China, Malaya, Burma and India, and feel that their jobs will no longer be open or pleasant for them after the war. These men will need employment in the Dominion to enable them to live and bring up their families. The third group is an especially easy one from our point of view—men in the forties and fifties, who have ample capital and/or assured income, who wish merely to make a pleasant home in a warm district, handy to fishing, yachting, and golf and to live in retirement. For the most part they wish to own from two to 10 acres or so, to have the interest of growing their own vegetables, fruit, poultry and, perhaps, dairy needs. Their contribution to the Dominion will be children of the best type, purchasers of local products without themselves being competitors in the labour market, tax and ratepayers and fine men in every way, men who have held high posts and kept the British flag flying in far and dangerous places. Among my correspondents in this class are generals, colonels, majors, I.C.S. men, forestry officers, business and professional men. They have capital of from £3OOO to £20,000, and incomes of from £4OO to £2OOO.

I am afraid that many of us in New Zealand are uneducated as to the enormous value—this gift from the gods —which the adding of men of these

three groups to our population means. It is only at the end of a war that we can get them. We failed to take them in 1919 and 1920. During my travels in the United States in 1941 apd 1942 I met many thousands of them, working hard for the British war effort, but lost to the Empire and to our Dominions, which needed them so badly.

Immigrants Provide Work We are all apt to look upon the newcomer from the selfish angle of our own particular occupation. The plumber feels that, if 100 plumbers arrive from Britain, the security of his job may be threatened; but those 100 plumbers will not come unaccompanied. They will come with hundreds and thousands of others—furniture workers, butchers, electricians, truck drivers, farmers and farm hands dentists, printers, storekeepers, teachers—all of whom will nee.d houses, furniture, food, clothing, gas, coal, electricity, transport and so on, creating as much work as they themselves can give. If we lift our population by 400,000 to 2,000,000, there will be room for approximately 25 per cent, more men in every type of existing employment.

Why distrub the present population figure, some may ask? The reason is that we cannot hope to keep New Zealand a British white country unless we give it a reasonably adequate population. Unless we do so, we remain a perpetual temptation, and irritation to the overcrowded countries bordering on the Pacific and Indian Oceans—countries which in the next genteration will develop industry modern organisation, and power on lines which few of us can at present conceive. Whether future world pressures are to be relieved by wars, or to be settled by arbitration before an authoritative world court, we New Zealanders must justify our ownership of these rich, temperate islands. Under intensive oriental agriculture, they would support 25,000,000 people, under white settlement they could carry 10,00,000, but should certainly have not less than five. I am writing this in an Indian train, journeying 1000 miles across semidesert plains. Monotonously the villages go by—hundreds and hundreds of them—thin villages and thin cattle, eking out a bare existence round the well-heads and from scantly monsoon rains. I have come from the Himalayan foothills, where the mountainsides have been laboriously terraced to give every square yard of cultivable soil; and the population leaps ahead by 5,000,000 a year. What will become of it? Two Activities

Some will comment: will not our hands be full enough with the demobilisation and reabsorption of our own men? That was the reason given for doing nothing about former British servicemen after the last war and why they went to Amercia or stayed on the dole in England. It must not happen again. We are not so lacking in ability that we cannot organise the two activities to go on simultaneously and to the great advantage of each other. Settlement, expansion, far from being contributors to unemployment, are the greatest creators of it. Palestine, which continued immigration throughout the depression, never suffered from it. When we stopped immigration in 1930, we cut out one of the big sources of work. The 25,000 new settlers who had come to us annually needed 5000 new houses, and all the other needs of a normal community.

I have written to the Government, as promised in the article. I believe we can all get together to see we do not lose this great chance another time. My small test shows that, if positive steps are taken in a wide way, we can have as many as we like—a quarter of a million, if we will, of the best British men, women and children.