IMMIGRATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 5

IMMIGRATION

Sir,-I think your listener to the 3YA Women’s Panel Discussion on Immigration misunderstood my opinion, which was perhaps not expressed as clearly as it might have been in the give-and-take of this strenuous form of extempore discussion. I have no desire to suggest that New Zealanders should exploit European immigrants nor that we should "flood the country with cheap. labour." I took it as understood that, since there are minimum wage laws .in New Zealand, there was no question of exploitation. But I did emphasise that these newcomers are ready te give real service for the wages they earn. They are accustomed to regard work as a necessary condition of life, and are not imbued with the idea of the average New Zealand worker that’ the community owes him a living whether he works hard for it or not. Your correspondent suggests that I am wrong to rejoice because many of these immigrants are willing to go into domestie service, She thinks that New Zealand should congratulate: itself upon the almest total disappearance of the domestic servant, In my opinion, the near impossibility of getting good domestic help at a reasonable wage in New Zealand is nothing to be proud of. It causes real hardship in many households-par-ticularly these in which there are elderly people, semi-invalids, or mothers with several young children. New Zealand women in general, as they are themselyes often painfully aware, are becoming duller and more limited in their outlook, because their days are filled, like those of your correspondent, with scrubbing floors and peeling potatoes, Their husbands, too, haye to do far more than they should be asked to do, because of the lack of domestic, and other, help. While we all spend our time being our

own gardeners, cooks, charwomen, nursemaids, launderers and odd-job men, we shall all continue to be nothing but undistinguished mediocrities.

HELEN GARRETT

‘Christchurch),