The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1. AUSTRALIA'S EXAMPLE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 250, 1 March 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1. AUSTRALIA'S EXAMPLE.

More people have come to New Zealand during the past few months than have left the country, but this does not seem to be due to any extraordinary efforts on the part of the authorities. The possibility is that the settlers now in this country are through the post the best advertising medium we have. Influxes of settlers who are satisfied with their new homes induce further settlement, and although the proportion of producers to dependents on the producers is not large enough, a vigorous inhospitality to the latter may effect the only valuable method of emigration—by increasing the rural population with people who produce necessities. Australia is an extraordinary example of a country which for a generation or two seemed to believe that the spreading of more folk over its vast area was an evil to be discountenanced, and it is only by the persistent efforts of some few public men and some public spirits that the Commonwealth now sees that Australia is worth keeping as a white man's land. The antagonism to increase of population in Australia came from guilds of men who feared that the introduction of skilled workers would affect their "jobs," and Australia "pulled a poor mouth" at any suggestion that its acres were fit for anything or worth settling on. The position is that only about one Australian in twenty knows anything about the real Australia, believing with stupid tenacity that Australia is Sydney or Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth or Hobart. Mr. T. K. Dow, in a recent vigorous defence of Australia, shows that out of a total population of 3,773,801 there were only 533,107 primary producers, which means that one producer carries the burden of seven parasites, the latter always making the most noise on every conceivable subject that crops up. Mr. Dow s,hows quite feasibly that Australia has merely to attract 1000 primary producers in order to make it possible for 7000 other folks, not primary producers, to live on them. This is, of course, what happens in all countries, and although the proportion of producers to "eaters" is a little greater in New Zealand than in Australia, there is still an incurable tendency towards parasitical occupation. In every country the dependents will always outnumber the producers, I>ut in new countries like Australia and New Zealand it is the business of' the authorities to decrease the proportion of the former. One of the most interesting features of Mr. Dow's article is his comparison of Canada with Australia, showing that Australia's "chance" is infinitely greater than Canada's. In fact, while Canada contains 250,000,000 acres of land suitable for settlement, Australia has 640,000,000 acres even more suitable. Australia has an area greater than the whole of the suitable land in Canada, which has an average yearly rainfall of from sixty to seventy inches, and Australia is not only dowered with this great asset but is at the present time able to attract settlers from America and elsewhere willing to farm dry areas under irrigation. We constantly hear of large numbers of New Zealanders going to Australia to settle. This is because people from elsewhere j are beginning to find out that Australia! is not a desert, and their opinions spread. Thanks to depressing politicians, lon»-faced non-producers, million-acre men and anti-Australians generally, the years preceding 1904 were marked by steady declines in arrivals. There was an excess of arrivals totalling 6613 in inos, but last year the excess was 30,000. The gain is really trifling, and Australia remains, like New Zealand, comparatively empty, but the point for consideration in the last-quoted figures is that the greater proportion of the influx became primary producers; therefore a valuable ■ asset and the best advertisement the country could have. Still, in Australia, as in New Zealand, the parasites increase faster than their hosts, and the larger proportion of the people know no more about Australia than if they were in London. It has been a late boast that the population of Sydney has largely increased during the year. It has, in fact, increased in greater proportion than the rural population of New South Wales, so that there ?re a greater number of nonproducers for the man on the land ta support. If, as is suggested in many Australian public prints, the tide of immigration is growing and that the majority of the people in the tide are going on the land, it is necessary for the Government of the Commonwealth to rouse itself in order to cope with it. The immigrant who comes to either Australia or New Zealand but who is unable to obtain access to the land, becomes a non-producer, a disappointed man, and a liability instead of an asset. The inability of any Government to deal with a tide of immigrants much smaller than that which goes to any farming State of Canada would effectually stop the tide, It is of vital importance to the Commonwealth and this Dominion that the tide should be augmented by every possible means, that trafficking in land should give place fo settlement of land, and that the growers should be in larger proportion to the eaters. The writer from whose article wo have quoted the above figures holds that the attraction of 125,000 primary producer? means the addition of one million folk to the population. For the verr best of reasons — the liability of Australia to attack —it is more necessary that the island continent shall be more quickly peopled than New Zealand, but many of the problems of Australia are the problems of this country, and the new desire that has sprung: up in the Commonwealth to pco- J I pie the land is, at bottom, a policy to '

insure the country against attack. When Australia fully recognises that neither Melbourne nor Sydney is Australia, and when New Zealand finds out that Auckland is. impotent without the settler who ocasionally walks its streets, and that

Wellington would have remained a village but for ploughs and cows, farmers and farmers' wives, both countries will spend more time in schemes for peopling the wastes than in place-hunting, speculation, and industrial quarrels.