More People

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 424, 8 August 1947, Page 5

More People

I was both good news and bad when the Minister of Rehabilitation told us last week that there were far more people in Britain ready to migrate to New Zealand than the available shipping can carry. It is good news that New Zealand still attraets the people of Britain and that our popula- _ tion, when immigration does begin to flow again, will be enriched by the people to whom in all the world we,already owe most. But it is not good news that so many

pot the people of Britain have de- ~ cided that *they must ,get out to get on. A few. thousands are of course not many out of 40 millions, but it is a depressing thought that Britain is now regarded as overpopulated and that stability, when it comes again, will probably be’ at a point appreciably below 40 millions. Nor should we delude ourselves into thinking that every displaced Briton will come to*rest in a British Dominion. A majority will, but many will not, and we deceive ourselves in New Zealand if we think that they would all come here if there were ships available to bring them here. Most of us, when we talk about immigration, talk without knowledge. We. don’t know, and we don’t seriously try to find out, whether we’ could absorb five thousand or fifty thousand people a year (even if we had no housing crisis). The matter is discussed at considerable length, but with scientific restraint, in the latest issue of the New Zealand Geographer, and the conclusion of the investigator, G. N. Calvert, is that New Zealand could not "without disruption and unbalance," add more than about 2 per cent. per annum to its population for the next two generations, and that to achieve this increase, or something like it, "we should need both to maintain our birth _ Tate at the highest levels in the recent years of war and demobilisa- ., tion, and also to admit immigrants sat a rate of something over 10,000 _ per annum." Mr. Calvert does not expect us to move quite as fast as that, but even if we do it will take us 10 years to reach two millions, 20 years to reach 2% millions, and between 40 and 50 years to get near four millions.