EMPIRE MIGRATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 January 1939, Page 12

EMPIRE MIGRATION

ALLEGED SELFISHNESS OF DOMINIONS DEPENDENCE ON GREAT BRITAIN. TALK OF DOG IN MANGER ATTITUDE. Plain talk to Australia —and also to New Zealand —is indulged in by the writer of an article in the “Nineteenth Century” on the subject of immigration. “While it appears" he says, “that a species of genius attached to the endowing of the dominions with complete political freedom, the fact remains —the Statute of Westminster notwithstanding—that most of the selfgoverning countries under the British Crown are still, and will long continue to be, dependent both economically and strategically upon Great Britain. This is certainly true of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.” For all the constitutional independence of the dominions, the article proceeds, foreign countries know full well the quarter on which they in fact depend for their existence; and this does not make the task of Great Britain in maintaining friendly relations with foreign Powers any the easier. Because none of these latter can understand why Great Britain, paying the piper, does not call the tune. The attitude of certain of the dominions is very like that of the dog in the manger, and this is specially true of Australia, where a mere 7,000,000 people are holding up the proper development of a country rather larger than the United States. Whether Australia could ever support a population equivalent to that of the United States of America is purely an academic question at this stage. No one with any knowledge of this island continent would deny that it could support quadruple its present population; and so could New Zealand, which now has only 1,500.000 inhabitants. Indeed Canada’s 11,0000,000 might at least be doubled without any great penetration into the far north. On the other hand, South Africa, with its 1,500,000 whites and 9,000,000 natives, has not much room to spare.

It is Australia, however, which must appear to the rest of the world as the most selfish of. all countries. Geographically this vast island would seem to be the natural outlet for the surplus people of Eastern countries whose teeming hundreds of million inhabitants have no chance of achieving in their own lands those higher standards of living which contact with Western civilisation has made them aspire to. Nevertheless, Australia puts up a colour bar and says, in effect, ‘’none but white men admitted.” This would not be so bad if white men were, in fact, admitted in anything like the numbers requisite to the White Australians establishing a moral right to maintain so exclusive a policy. But what are the facts? So jealous are the Australians of the living standards they have succeeded in establishing that a majority of them regard every new arrival as a potential wagecutter, and in consequence immigrarjts are frequently subjected to both social and economic ostracism. And any Government which essayed to encourage the immigration of Britons and Continentals on the scale which sheer common sense demands would lose office at the next elections; and both Federal and State elections are held every three years. I know there are' hundreds of thousands of Australians who deplore this attitude of their compatriots, but the latter are in the majority, and the result is that more British-born people have left Australia than have gone there during the past seven years; and there is a public outcry every time a few hundred Italians or other Continentals arrive.

New Zealand’s migration policy is similar to that of Australia, but, being a much smaller and relatively much more densely peopled country, it is a great deal less in the limelight. Canada has, of course, admitted considerable numbers of Continental settlers, but there have been singularly few from Great Britain, or even from the Continent, in recent years. In the estimation of most people in Great Britain the White Australia policy is understood and sympathised with, but what is inexplicable is that the Australians, determined as they are to exclude Asiatics and coloured peoples, are not straining every nerve to build up their population at least from Great Britain as well as from Continental countries. A wise mixing of foreign immigrants in isolated areas, coupled with an insistence on English being taught in schools, would probably produce a new generation whose members in the aggregate would be far more loyal to the country of their .common adoption than to any of the individual countries from among which their progenitors had migrated.

Far be it from this writer —who is an Australian —to discount the wonderful development which has been achieved in parts of this island continent by a population much smaller than that of Greater London. And we may all rest assured that it will never be forgotten that 460,000 Australians —every man a volunteer —sprang to arms in the common cause of Empire in the dark days of 1914-18. All 1 want to stress is that the present policy of Australia is doing so much to aggravate the “have-not” countries that not only Australia but Great Britain may have to pay dearly for such folly.