The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily-TUESDAY, FEB 19, 1895 A CUT AT THE TIMBER TRADE.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 197, 19 February 1895, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published DailyTUESDAY, FEB 19, 1895 A CUT AT THE TIMBER TRADE.

«■ Lv connection with the contemplated action of the Wairarapa North County Council in charging the local sawmillers a license fee, our contemporary the Wairarapa Daily Times considers the charge a heavy one, and will take many by surprise, but tlmt there is an equity in the proposed arrangement. The interests of the county and sawmillers are so far identical that both desire good roads, and a reasonable payment of the same is of mutual advantage. We do not agree that this is an equitable tax. We presume the circumstanced and surroundings of the sawmillei-s in the Wairarapa are much the same as they are here, inasmuch as they are ratepayers who have to contribute their share in the forming and maintenance of the roads, and are therefore entitled to use them without an exception being made in their case It should be considered, also, that sawmillers have in the past, and do at the present time, employ an immense amount of labour, for which as a rule they pay the very best wages. Further, we think a had time has bpcu choseu t> make this additi- nal impost. Tim ber has been cut at a loss for several years pas f , or has barely paid ex penses, and because there is a slight movement upwards, owing to the opening which n'.w exists in England and on the Coutiuent of Europe, that is no reason why any local body should endeav-uir to hamper the industry by such a vexatious tax as a charge on " each circular." Surely it must be patent to the people in the county that an industry such as that of timber cutting benefits the whole community as well as the owners of the sawmills. It circulates money in wagea all the year round ; the land is partially cleared for agriculture, and prepared for families to be settled upon it. No greater example of the justice of our opinions on the subject can be found than in this district which owes a very large amount of its prosperity to the enterprise of the sawmillers in the first instance, who supplied the " circulating medium " which kept the place going until the land was cleared sufficiently to enable che farmers to get on their land, aad breed the cattl^ and sheep which now supply to a great extent the place of the timber industry in the creation of income and revenue. The timber trade is handicapped more than sufficiently already, and it is a cut throat policy even to attempt to put more on it It would be more in accordance with the fitness of things if the country paid the sawmillers a premium on every thousand feet of timber they exported from the colony