RATING ON UNIMPROVED VALUE BILL.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 50, 27 August 1895, Page 2

RATING ON UNIMPROVED VALUE BILL.

TO THE EDITOR OP THE STAR. Sir, — Mr Ward, in moving the second reading oi this Bill, said it embodied a vital principle of considerable consequence. Therefore, I think lam quite justified in again referring to it. In No. 10 of Hansard of this session the Premier is reported thus:—" In Wellington you small tottering houses — old houses here on Lambton Quay and in Moles worth street. If the owners (and doubtless occupiers) will hold these small cottages or truuipevy shops on land which has been made valuable by other people's improvements, it is perfectly right that under this Bill they should be called upon to pay more than they are now t/rj/nf/." in the above statement Mr Seddon acknowledges what I have already proved in your columns, that the poorer people — cobtagers — would, under this JJill, have higher rates to pay than they have under the Act in force now. Mr Seddon would also doubtless sneer at many of the tottering cottage^', in Foikling if he saw them in the same way as he has done at those in Wellington. Oh, how we have descended 1 We have[now a Premier who not only tries to force a most unjust law which will bear hardly upon the owners of small cott-.-i^ ages built on, say, a quarter of an acr|^r£ to five acres of land, but who jeers at;. *; the " tottering " cottages and " trumpery " shops of those who are too poor to build better ones. Surely no-one with any sense of justice or true sympathy for the workers will for the future support either him or any of his followers. I am, etc., George Wilks. Feilding, August 23rd, 1895.