HANSARDISMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3769, 23 July 1907, Page 2

HANSARDISMS.

Our Member on the Land Question. Speaking on the Address-in-Re-ply, Mr Stevens, in touching on the land question, said inter alia ; —ln former clays, when sections of land were sold at auction by the Crown, or were opened for free selection, and persons purchased these sections of land, whether in town or country, they held them for years, and some of them for very few indeed. Speculators held them unimproved, while the bona fide settler improved his property, built his house, ploughed his land and cultivated it, and made a comfortable home for himself, and all the while the. speculator waited for the unearned increment. Now, the work ot the settler increased the value of the absentee’s section. I think that no one can deny that that added value was largely due to the work of the settler. By this means large fortunes navd been amassed in this country. This was one of the most objectionable things to the State that possibly could have occurred. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact; and were the land laws not altered and such things guarded against, the system would go on ad infinitum ; it is going on now, to some extent. I should like to make a suggestion now, which I hope will be accepted as a practical one. . . . Put the State in the place of the individual. The Minister of Lands has scheme now for the purpose of nationalising so much land —making endowments for supplying with funds the aged pensioner, the charitable aid recipient, and the school child. All these three institutions deserve to be, and must be maintained, and properly maintained, and if a fund can be established lor the purpose of doing this, then I say by all means let us do it in the way which I will suggest. Take each block and have it roaded and surveyed. Begin with Section I—That1 —That is an endowment ; Section 2, dispose of to the people, occupation with right of purchase, lease with right of purchase ; Section 3 is an endowment; Section 4 is disposed of in the way I have indicated. As for making endowments by saying there are twenty thousand acres in one block it is an endowment truly ; and with a sixty-six years’ renewable lease, what will happen ? There will be great difficulty in inducing people to go on the land, because the lands now to be made endowments are not such lands as were made endowments in the South —in Canterbury and Otago—and in some portions of the North Island. I am sorry to say very few, because very few such endowments were made for educational purposes in the North. What we require is to make endowments of land which should be classified. By what means ? Ten thousand acres to be cut up—half first-class, some se-cond-class, and some third-class land. This is not the way in which the residue of our lands must be classified. I say that the classification of each individual section, whether in 100, 200, or 1000-acre areas, should be carefully made ; the topographical features depicted either in writing or on plans, so that there may be no mistake as to what the piece of land is, and what it is suitable for. . . . . In placing people upon the land we should let them know that they have a sufficiency of land on which to make a living when they go upon it If

you are going to lay down a hard and fast rule that no man can sell out to another, or that two sections are not to be joined together when there is an absolute necessity for it, I say it will be carrying out a most beautiful theory, but one that will not work out in practice. I have every desire to cut up land into the smallest possible areas, and to give every person who desires to have land the fullest and freest opportunity to become a settler, and to make himself happy and contented upon the land. I also say this : That, the question of title is a mere theory—nothing more than a theory. What would it matter whether these lease-in-perpetuity tenants held Crown grants or parchment leases ? Absolutely not a snap of the fingers to the Crown, for the very reason that they have their tenure there for the length of time specified in their lease. Neither this House, nbr, I believe, any other Legislature in the world would consider it equitable to attempt to pass any law which would deprive those holders of the rights they hold from the Crown under such leases There is

not a member in this House, whether he be a city or a country representative, who is more anxious to help landless people on the land that I am, but I must say, from the practical experience I have had in the matter of landsettlement, that We are making too much of this question. We are making so much of it, that I can only compare it to the hitching of eighty elephants to a 24-ton gun to pull it along. What do we find to make any great noise about there being no land for the people ? We are not yet a million of people. The population is now only about 850,000, and our country is easily capable of carrying ten million. .

. . The areas of land now to be settled are such as to require very special and differential treatment as compared with the lands of the colony which have hitherto been settled. With respect also to the form of tenure, I cannot divest myself of the opinion which I have held since I had the honour of a seat in this Chamber in the year 1882, when the Hon. William Rolleston brought down his Land Bill for the purpose of giving perpetual leases to Crown tenants,

with the right of renewal at the end of thirty years in the first instance, and twenty-one-year M periods thereafter with no right of purchase. I then said, when the Bill came before the Waste I,auds Committee, of which I was a member, that it was my intention to move in Committee that each Crown tenant should have the right, after complying with the whole of the conditions contained in his lease, to acquire the freehold of his property. I have watched land-settlement, I have been personally interested in it, I have watched the progress from then till now, with the result that I am still confirmed in the opinion which I then expressed. That Land Bill, after it came down to the House from the Committee, went from this Chamber to the Legislative Council, and it was in the Legislative Council that the right of purchase was inserted ; and I say, without egotism, it was largely through my suggestion and instrumentality that such purchas-ing-clause was inserted ; and there can be no question about the success of settlement under that system. . . . Now, I have no objection whatever to endowments. I have the greatest belief in making preparation for futurity—but to take the whole remainder of the Crown lands and convert them into endowments will, in my opinion • | retard settlement rather than ad- -« vance it. Coming to the question * of the graduated tax for the purpose of reducing the large holdings, I have not the least objection to any reasonable taxation being placed in a graduated form upon the properties which are too large for the benefit ot the community. , This, I think, is a proper step—a step in the right direction—a step preferable to the limitation of value to ,£50,000, as was suggested. One difficulty in the way of that proposal, and in my mind one objection to it, was this : that the owners of such properties had their freedom for ten years, and at the end of that period nearly every section upon which there was an excess of value would be thrown into the market ; and if the Minister desires to revert to his original • intention of having the limitation of ,£50,000 to the holdings, then I would suggest to him, instead of giving ten years within which to \ dispose of the surplus, that they K should be compelled to begin to / dispose of the surplus in the second year, and that every second year at least a certain area of land should be put into the market, and so the market would be fed gradu-r ally with land. . . . What we require to do is to see that our land settlement progresses, and that there shall be such a revenue returned to the State from the land as to repay some of the enormous outlay which has yet to be made before these lands can become habitable. Now, we have .£5,000,000 odd locked up in land that has been purchased for settlement, and my suggestion to the Hon. the Minister of Lands is to allow these settlers to pay off the whole of the amounts, instead of the Crown retaining a 10 per cent interest in it. If the whole be paid off then, from time to time, instead of compelling by the limitation of ,£50,000 or by an excessive landtax the work to be done, the Crown would be in the position, with the money here in the country already, to go on acquiring other estates and feeding the market gradually, and have proper k permanent settlement hand in hand with the development ot the country. There can be no question that if the lease in perpetuity were a short lease, a lease that would fall in within a reasonable time, I would say, very well, if you think it is good for the State, continue to hold those leases. Let the Crown hold them. But, as it is, the fee-simple of the land has practically passed from the Crown for ever —for ever, as far as we and many generations to come are concerned. I hope that, whatever legislation may be brought down, the right of a settler to hold a piece of land that he may hand down to his family when he departs this life will not be lost sight of. I hope he will be able to acquire the freehold of his small holding.