RATING ON LAND VALUES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16488, 2 March 1914, Page 6

RATING ON LAND VALUES.

It is rathor late in tho day for tho Conservatives to be tolling the people of Now Zealand about the evils of the taxation of unimproved land values, but your good old Tory does not mind being a decade or a century behind the times. It must be twelve or fourteen years since Christchurch first adopted the system, and today every visitor remarks on the extent and magnificence of tho private gardens, on the fact that every cottage has its little space for flower beds and on the brightness, airiness and beauty of tho residential areas. Travellers call this the garden city of Australasia, and we believe it deserves the description. Yet in this very city of Christchurch to-day tho Tories are telling the same old story about the iniquities of the rating system, its encouragement of slums, its

discouragement of gardens and its prejudicial effect on the health of the community. It may be true that wealthy men disposo of their broad gardens because of the heavy taxation they have to pay under the rational system, although wo confess that we have not observed any very marked illustration of tho fact, if it is a fact. But if tho maintenance of large private gardens depends on tho rating we say unhesitatingly that rational rating is preferable. We find it hard to believe the small cottagers should be overtaxed in order that wealthier people should he enabled to maintain for their private enjoyment wide expanses of pleasure grounds. The cutting-up of tho grounds of the late Mr H. WynnWilliani9 is attributed by our friends to the operation of the rating system, but Mr Wynn-Williams himself would have been the very last to suggest that a cottager should pay an extra two or three pounds in rates in order that he, and other lovers of gardens, should be able to maintain two or three acres in lawns and flower-beds. Tho truth, of course, is that these grounds are cut up because the owners see tho opportunity of making a substantial profit. The argument that rating on land values encourages the crowding of buildings is equally fallacious. If land is worth £4OOO an acre it is not the difference between the rate levied on the capital value and the rate levied on the unimproved value that induces the owner to utilise it all for buildings. Land does not attain that value unless it is urgently in demand, and if a man chooses to build a small cottage on a section that is really required as a business site he must expect to have to pay for the privilege. Tho best proof of the effectiveness of the rational system is to be found in the record of the polls taken on the question in the dominion. A hundred local bodies have adopted the system and only some twenty have rejected it, and in many instances districts that rejected it at the first poll gladly adopted it later on whon its operation had been fully explained. The Riccarton people, who have watched the operation of the system in Christchurch during the past fourteen years, had an opportunity on Friday of expressing their opinions concerning it, and they adopted it for their own borough by the emphatic majority of three to one.