RUSH LEGISLATION

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 59, 7 September 1926, Page 8

RUSH LEGISLATION

The Native Land Amendment Bill was read a second time "pro forma" in the Legislative Council yesterday and referred to its Native Affairs Committee. We are glad to know that that Committee will not have the opportunity of neglecting its duty as grossly as did the corresponding Committee in "another place" when the same measure was before it last week. Though clause U'. of the Bill was one of the most astonishing provisions for which any New Zealand Government ever ventured to assume the responsibility, it was accepted by the Native Affairs Committee of the House with a single .amendment which was litile more than a scratch on- its surface. The essential viciousness r>f the clause remained in full force and effect. Without limit of time in either direction and without any provision for compensation, the title to every acre of land in the country which had ever been Native land ■was to be retrospectively weakened by the creation of a new jurisdiction and the recognition of rights which, if they had ever existed, had been ignored or even rejected by the proper tribunals, and having slumbered for years were equally unknown to the original Native owners and to a succession of purchasers. These ghosts of things which Courts and Eegistrars, lawyers and laymen, had considered to be as dead as John Doe and Richard Roe. and which might even be equally fictitious in their origin, were suddenly to be given a substance and a strength which would enable them to violate the sanctity of a clean certificate of title under the Land Transfer Act. Such, without the intervention of any Court, was the effect of clause 13 in the Prime Minister's Bill as introduced. While allowing the Native Land Court a discretion in the matter, the amendment proposed by the Native Affairs Committee left the retrospective operation of the essential mischief of the clause—its retrospective tampering with the highest class of titles in the land—, untouched. When we dealt with this matter on Friday last we wrote with uo more knowledge of it than any layman could derive from a perusal of the clause itself. It was on the face of it outrageous that merely because "upon a plan produced before the Court," and whether the Court had approved of it or not, a right-of-way had been shown as laid off, the Court should be deemed to have had jurisdiction to grant it and to have granted it. We have since learned that in the case at which the clause was apparently aimed, or at any rate in one of the cases which it immediately affects, there j was no right-of-way at all in existence, and the clause would have "ipso facto" created a right-of-way to which there was not and never had been the faintest shadow of a legal claim. We respectfully suggest to the Government that where Jones and Smith or Hoani and Wiremu have a quarrel and it is deemed a fit subject for legislation, the matter should be dealt with by a "Jones Enabling and Smith Disabling Bill," just as openly and specifically as the Smyth Divorce case was. To give the very foundations of the whole Land Transfer system a shake and to open the door to all sorts of unmeritorious and dangerous claims for the sake of one or two favoured persons is as absurd as the practice attributed by Lamb to the Chinese of burning a house in order to roast, a pig.