A POLICY NEEDED

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 182, 28 April 1919, Page 6

A POLICY NEEDED

While he was in the Auckland district recently the Minister of Lands (Mb. Guthkie) gave some attention to the question of making kauri gum lands available for settlement. This, is a matter which needs to be considered very carefully, and not only from the standpoint of the Minister of Lands, whoso chief aim it is to make as much land as possible immediately available for settlement. It is, of course, right that everything feasible should be done to bring land now waste into productivity, but to throw such lands open to settlement is not always the best way to secure this object. For instance, in North Auckland there is a considerable extent of poor land' which formerly carried kauri—some of it still carrying a sparse growth of that timber—which is almost valueless from the point of view of ordinary settlement. These same lands, however, if replanted with kauri would ultimately yield a handsome return year .by year in perpetuity. Not a little land in the Dominion that is only fit for forest has been for settlement, necessarily at very low rates, and the public interest will not be conserved _if tho Lands Department enters blindly upon a policy.of settling waste lands. This applies with .particular force > to North Auckland, because in that region kauri, the richest of all timber crops, frequently grows or might be grown on tho class of land that is of the least value for any other purpose. The only way to reach a rational and systematic policy in this matter, is to provide the Forestry Department (at present little more than a name) with an expert staff capable of demarcating the forests and forest areas of the Dominion. As we have frequently pointed out, the effect of this departure would be not to reduce the scope of settlement and rural employment, but to extent it,greatly. Apart from the fact that the inauguration of a systematic forest 'policy would open up a wide field of profitable employment in the immediate future and for years to come, the forests as they were brought into cultivation would afford homes and permanent occupation to an evcr-incrcafeing number ,of _ families under conditions which would easily compare with those of ordinary farm settlement. 1