Opposition attacks land corporation as State incursion

Press, 6 February 1986, Page 2

Opposition attacks land corporation as State incursion

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

The National Opposition has attacked the Government’s plans to set up a Land Development and Management Corporation as its agency for commercial farming and land management. It was a “giant step towards the nationalisation of land,” said National’s spokesman on lands, Mr Neil Austin (Bay of Islands). National’s spokesman on finance, Mr Bill Birch (Franklin), said he supported any moves to improve efficiency in State corporations and departments, but what the Government was doing went much further than that. Making the Forest Service and Lands and Survey Department corporations would expand the role of the State to compete with the private sector, Mr Birch said. As a result, the Government would become larger rather than smaller

compared with the private sector. Further examples of the expansion of the State through corporations were the move by Government Life and the Development Finance Corporation into banking. National opposed the Government’s taking on functions which could be

done quite adequately by •the private sector, Mr Birch said. The Government had not explained why it needed to compete with the private sector in those activities. Mr Austin said that by setting up the corporation the Government was preparing the ground for a giant take-over of farm land. It had created an economic climate whereby fanners were walking off the land, farm values were plummeting, and now there was a corporation that could buy up land for the State. The net result would be large tracts of Govern-ment-owned land. Most young farmers would be able to aspire only to be managers of hunks of State land, he said. Powers given to the new corporation to buy and lease land for itself would pave the way for “big brother” to take control of many farms already under threat.