IMMIGRANTS SOLICITED

Waikato Independent, Volume XLIII, Issue 6035, 21 October 1946, Page 3

IMMIGRANTS SOLICITED

PUBLICITY ABROAD A need for immigration to New Zealand to support the industrial development that was going on rapidly in this country was emphasised by Mr T. H. Langford, public relations officer of the Christchurch City Council, in a recent address to members of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. In a small, hut it was hoped, effective way, his department was doing its best to encourage immigration, he said.

The excellent brochure produced by the junior chamber and the booklets published by the Canterbury Manufacturers’ Association and the Christchurch City Council were now being sent to ail the towns of the British Isles, to the libraries, trades councils, ar.d all the colleges of the British universities, and they were being sent also to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Czechoslovakia. Mr Langford said that just as Britain was and always would be our best customer, so the British people would be our best immigrants. “If we want British immigrants we must go after them,” he said. Nevertheless, in the years before the war there had been a continuous exodus from the other European countries mentioned, mostly to Canada and America. “They are a particularly able and virile people, and a smattering of that type of people into our population would be all to the good.”

Mr Langford said that the Pacific was bound to become the political centre of the world. Tremendous changes' were now going on, and if there was to be trouble in the world in the future—and it seemed there always would be—the Pacific would have) its share; “It is not for the sake of the Aussics that the British Army is going to train in Australia, it is not for our sake that, the United States is looking for bases wherever it can get them in the Pacific, and the industrialists on our doorsteps are not here just for the good of New Zealand “We have got to develop industrially, and we have got to increase our population if we are going to hold for any length of time our wonderful and desirable country,” he said. “There are going to be big changes in the distribution of the world’s population. We want to seek our share of it and see not that we get the best share but that we get our proportion of what is best.”