The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1929 NO ROOM FOR WORKERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 799, 21 October 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1929 NO ROOM FOR WORKERS

A N official hint has been given to the Dominions that more ** opportunity for the employment and settlement of British immigrants within relatively empty territories would he appreciated in the British Isles. This notification of Great Britain’s need is less surprising than it is humiliating to the people and politicians of the Dominions who, these days, have to confess that they cannot find work for their own unemployed, far less provide industrial room for the victims of unemployment in the United Kingdom.

The British Isles occupy only one-sixtietli of the land of the Empire and contain about two-thirds of the Empire’s white population. Each of the great continents of Canada and Australia has a population no larger than the aggregate of people in London and Manchester. This Dominion, which is almost equal in land area to the United Kingdom, has' a population which is only that of Glasgow. South Africa and Rhodesia may be ruled out of the count for the moment because of the racial difficulties, the threat of black domination, and the seriousness of unemployment. In Natal, for example, the Government found it desperately necessary a few months ago to relieve social distress among white inhabitants by placing 30,000 men on relief and railway works at a wage of five shillings a day. “And this in a land where meat costs one shilling and threepence a pound, and bread eightpence a loaf!” A statement has been made by the Rt. Hon. J. If. Thomas, Labour Minister of Unemployment in Great Britain, that tens of thousands of persons in the British Isles are ready and willing to migrate to the Dominions. Applications for employment within the Empire overseas pour in, but the response from the Dominions is little more or better just now than an expression of patriotic sympathy. Canada and Western Australia, with their ample scope for land settlement on comparatively reasonable terms, alone are trying hard to help the Mother Country by absorbing some of her unemployed, but neither the leading Dominion in the Old World and the most progressive State in Australia has been able to keep imce with the British demand for employment and an opportunity to make a living free of the shadow of pauperism. The remaining Dominions and States overseas are unable to maintain a steady flow of immigration. A few religious organisations are doing their best and doing it well to provide agricultural training and independent farm-work for British lads in this country and in the other Dominions, but their combined efforts are meagre in the aggregate. Some bitter comment on the tragic conditions has been made in British journals. As the “Co-operative News” has observed: “Emigration a hundred years ago was a punishment for crime. We transport criminals no longer; we emigrate the poor instead. Carelessness in choosing emigrants and fostering their welfare when once they have left our shores has created in the public mind the firm conviction that what was once a punishment for crime has become a punishment for poverty.” Neither that mood nor outlook is of any good at all either for Great Britain or for the Dominions.

The Empire is A r ast enough and endowed sufficiently with natural resources to support ten times its white population, but the problem of distribution clearly is beyond the capacity of the present generation of politicians. Here, in this country, where Nature is more generous in its aid than in any other Dominion, particularly as regards climate, the Government and Parliament together have done nothing at all to solve the New Zealand problem of unemployment. It has become so acute that its extent has been made a State secret, but enough has been .disclosed to show that the number of unemployed is at least equal to the total of assisted British immigrants annually a-few years ago. And while this lamentable situation has assumed the character of a chronic disease eighty legislators have taken seventeen weeks to pass a few crude legislative measures! It is long past time for calling a halt to their extravagance and bewildered mediocrity.