THE POLICY OF THE LATE HON. JOHN BALLANCE.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 74, 24 September 1895, Page 2

THE POLICY OF THE LATE HON. JOHN BALLANCE.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAR. Sir, - • Let " Colonial Farmer " be manly enough to sign his own name to his letters. Briefly, in reply to him, I may say that I am in favor of a just method for the disintegration of large | estates, but with the right of acquiring j the freehold by the purchasers ; and I am also in favor of taxation being placed principally on realised wealth, thereby relieving struggling small farmers, tradesmen, and manufacturers, of crushing taxation, and I also belieye in a free breakfast table for everybody. Personally, I liked the late Mr Ballance, but I ani writing politically, and, therefore, I have no hesitation in saying he he was a political mountebank. In 1884, Mr Ballance said to the House, "We -will abolish the property tax and substitute a land tax." In 1885, Mr Ballance opposed Sit George Grey's land tax, and objected to " a bursting-up tax on the land as causing alarm to the land owners of the colony." In 1891 Mr Ballance told the House, " The great goal of the Liberal party is a land tax pure and simple, " and in the same speech said, " There is a great authority on the land question, Henry George, — a gentleman who has revolutionised public opinion on the land question," and in reference to the unimproved value says, 11 That a limit of time should be taken, ten or twenty years, and that improvements before that time should not be taken into consideration, that the State should have the benefit of these improvements." Mr Ballance accepted these theories of Henry George,^ not because they were practical and sound financially, but because they were popular. In his speech on the Financial Statement, 1891, the following ideas are prominent: (1) Land nationalisation. (2) Bursting up big estates by impolitic and unjust methods, by laws passed by his unthinking following. (3) Procedure by degrees. First one Act and then another to be passed till all the taxes of the country be placed on the land, and that the towns should receive a beneficial interest in the taxation paid by the country settlers (State tenants or State slaves). Note that the State is to receive the benefit of the labor and money spent on felling bush, grassing, logging up, grubbing up rushes and stumps, draining, etc., and only now houses and fences to be exempt from taxation i ! " Colonial Farmer " refers to British landowners. Many of them are now only too glad to let their rural lands rent free, provided the tenants will pay all rates and taxes. 1 am, etc., George Wilks. Feilding, September 21st, 1895.