THE NEW LAND TAX

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 36, 11 August 1936, Page 11

THE NEW LAND TAX

SHEEP FARMERS' POSITION

(Special to the "Evening Post.")

MASTERTON, This Day. An opinion that the Government had failed to realise what it was doing in its reintrbduction of- the graduated land tax was expressed by the Dominion president of the Farmers' Union Mr.W. W. Mulholland, in the course of his address in' the Farmers' Rooms yesterday.

In spite of the Government's avowed intention to relieve the working farmer —he had yet to learn what other sort of farmer there was—Mr. Mulholland said, he felt certain that the imposition of the graduated land tax was the result" of not knowing the conditions that applied to the farming: industry. The .--Government had been working on what was applicable to the dairy iarmer, and had forgotten the existence of the sheep farmer. The sheep farmer had to have a very much greater value of unimproved land than the dairy farmer. A dairy farmer with land of an unimproved value of £13,000 would have a pretty big business. A sheep farmer with the same unimproved value of land, purely sheep country, would not have a very big business. A sheep farmer in this class might have a net income of from £400 to £600, and he was now to be mulcted in an amount of £108. Particularly in the South Island there was a great deal of rough country, of which it was necessary to have double an improved value of. £13,000 in order to make a living. Many of, these grazing runs had been cut by the previous Government to the smallest workable areas, and in his opinion some of them could not be worked under the taxation now imposed.

The Government had intended to increase the land tax. Mr. Mulholland added, but he aid not think it had intended to make an impost which would bear so severely on mortgagees as well as on owners. He did not know whether it was the Government's intention to take an arbitrary cut off the mortgage to enable the farmer to carry on. If so, it was going to be very hard on the mortgagee.