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Bth Day.] Naturalisation. [13th June, 1911. Sir WILFRID LAURIER : You would not accept the naturalisation of a man in Canada, for instance ? Sir JOSEPH WARD : I am not prepared to say that if he be Canadian born. Sir WILFRID LAURIER : That is what I mean. Sir JOSEPH WARD : If he were a foreigner to Canada, whom you naturalised, and he came to New Zealand, we would not accept your naturalisation. We would require him to commence de novo and to comply with our conditions. Sir WILFRID LAURIER : That is a different condition of things. Sir JOSEPH WARD : I think, to some extent, we ought to be able to meet in a general way the position in order to enable cases of that kind to be dealt with. In dealing with this matter I want to make a suggestion to Mr. Churchill, the head of the Department here. The Bill which was sent out for the consideration of the Government of New Zealand made provision for two distinct things separately : The acquisition and the loss of British citizenship otherwise than by naturalisation, and the status of aliens and the naturalisation of aliens. What I suggest is that the provisions of the Imperial Bill regarding naturalisation, which are intended to be of universal application, should be collected in one part of the Bill and expressly declared to be applicable. If that is done I am quite certain that no reasonable objection could be offered, so far as New Zealand is concerned, to the exercise of power by the Imperial Legislature in denning for the whole Empire the conditions of British citizenship, and it would be a step in the right direction ; but what we would require to have in that Bill, in my opinion, would be power to provide the necessary machinery for bringing those provisions into operation in the Dominions and Colonies and determining the Colonial officials by whom the powers of the Secretary of State are to be there exercised, and power to establish the necessary penal provisions, appointing the fees, and authorizing regulations by the Governor in Council; and there should be power provided to impose further restrictions, limitations, and conditions on application in the Dominion for Imperial naturalisation. The powers at present provide for Colonial naturalisation to be granted on easier terms than Imperial naturalisation, but without extra-territorial operation. That is the law just now on that particular point. Now, if what I suggest is done, I see no reason whatever, speaking from the New Zealand standpoint, for our being opposed to the general proposals of the Imperial Government, because, after all, we still can exercise the power of the exclusion of aliens under another Act, and so long as we hold that power there does not appear to me to be any reason why we should not in a general way support a proposal to have uniformity ; but I do think it important that the two matters in the proposed Bill should be kept apart —there ought to be no difficulty about that, so far as draftsmanship is concerned—in order that certain parts of the Bill may be made applicable by Order in Council in our country if it seems to us desirable to do it. The CHAIRMAN : You have more than the power of exclusion of aliens left to you ; you have the power of exclusion of British subjects, if of a particular colour or a particular race. Sir JOSEPH WARD : That is so, so we are perfectly safe in that particular respect. Mr. CHURCHILL : Or any other conditions you may choose to make at any time by your law. Sir JOSEPH WARD : That is so. In our country we would not naturalise Asiatics, that is quite certain ; we have power to deal with their coming to the Dominion under other Acts of Parliament. If in the ordinary course of things