AUSTRALIA’S WASTE SPACES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18821, 11 July 1923, Page 9

AUSTRALIA’S WASTE SPACES

SYDNEY, July 10. Mr. Hughes,-in a special article in the Daily Telegraph, urging the need for developing and populating Australia, points out that Japan, as a matter of necessity of life and death, must find an outlet for her surplus population. She believes in the greatness of her destiny, and feels capable of going much further than she has done in national development, and is she to be told that she alone among nations must not do co? It is hardly for Australia, whose great need is population, to complain if she dos not consent to impose checks on her own population. If these millions knock at our doors, how are we to deny admittance? We cannot hope to find shelter behind some treaty of Washington or another League of Nations. That cannot help us, and it will be to the Interest of the greater part of the world that these starving millions should settle in Australia, rather than with them these millions with certain death behind them. They may never come, but if they do, and find us still a mere handful of people in possession of a great continent, then for us and our cherished ideals it is the end. We must prove ourselves worthy to fence off from an overcrowded world one of earth’s fairest possessions. A little time is still ours to prepare, by filling our vacant spaces with men and women of our own race, and to do all that needs doing to make good our claim to this great fruitful continent.