EMPIRE SETTLEMENT

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 127, 27 February 1928, Page 9

EMPIRE SETTLEMENT

PRIVATE BILL IN HOUSE OF , COMMONS POSITION STATED BY MR.. AMERY Rugby, February 24. The House of Commons to-day passed the second reading of a private Bill the object of which is to extend the benefits of the Empire Settlement Act. Mr. A. A. Somerville (Conservative), who moved the second reading, urged the necessity of giving more encouragement to the spirit of adventure of the young men of this country. He said we ought to be sending out to the Dominions yearly two or three hundred thousand men instead of the present average of fifty to sixty thousand. The Right Hou. L. S. Amery, Dominion Secretary, said the Government endorsed the second reading of the Bill with some reservations. He deprecated the idea involved in the Bill of using unemployment benefit for the assistance of emigration. He said it was only men likely to succeed that we ought to encourage to go overseas. The mere fact of men being unemployed was not in itself any argument why we should run the risk of exchanging unemployment in this country with home surroundings for unemployment in unfamiliar surroundings. A great deal of the hesitation and restricted attitude towards Empire settlement which was shown overseas, particularly in some Dominions, was due to the idea that we were trying to get rid of people we did not want here in order to let them take their chance of sinking or swimming overseas. Unemployment was our own domestic problem which we had got to solve on our own lines by finding the true balance of industrv and the readjustment of occupations of our population. We were not asking the Dominions to help us to solve our own problems. What we were doing in settlement was in a spirit of willing co-operation in Empire matters in moving people from one part of the Empire to another. It was very desirable to make it quite clear here and in the Dominions that this was a policy of co-operation and not a policy of our trying to get a major advantage. The need of the Dominions for more population was greater than our need of reducing our population. While we should benefit from it, the country to which migrants went should benefit even more.

Mr. Amery recalled that the Empire Settlement Act came into force in 1922. In the first three years the average number of persons assisted to migrate was •10.000, and in 1926-27 the number was over 64,000. In 1927 there was a slight reduction as compared with 1926, of 2500, almost entirely due to local depression in New Zealand. Taking all the circumstances of these years into account, he thought they had not done so badly.—British Official Wireless.