A GRAVE SCANDAL.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2039, 9 October 1919, Page 3

A GRAVE SCANDAL.

ROBBERY AND DEBAUCHERY.

OF THE MAORIS,

A very grave scandal appears to exist with regard to the purchase of native lands, and the question arises whether the purchase money should not l)e placed in trust for the vendors, in preference to handing them the principal to dissipate at their will. This matter has frequently been before the public,'but never more forcibly than in a letter recently penned by the Rev. IT. J. Fletcher, of Taupo, which has been published in the Hawkes Bay Herald. Mr Fletcher writes; “Two weeks ago I spent the night: at a Maori pa called Tokaanu. The chief of the pa is an intelligent man named Kepa.te Ahuru. His people have lately sold a large-block of land stretching back from the .pa' to the Kaimanawa Range, I am not aware of the acreage or price. I asked him what they had done with the money. His answer was, ‘Kua pan.’ ‘lt has been consumed/ He meant that most of it had been spent in useless waste.’- This useless waste mostly took the form of over indulgence in intoxicants, and Mr Fletcher enumerates in detail a very large amount of liquor laid in by the Tokaanu hotelkeeper, since (he tourist reason, though (hero are only 25 white adults there. Drunkenness, he says, is common. Tangis are reported to be drunken orgies. No tangi is considered well supplied unless intoxicants are there in plenty, and the Maoris get it in defiance of (he law. In concluding a lamentable tale of Maori, degradation,through natives without a proper sense of respoiisib.lity suddenly becoming possessed-of large sums of money, Mr Fletcher stresses the following points: (1) The enormous areas of Maori land waste and unutilised; (2) Hie terrible waste of the purchase money by rbc Maoris; (3) the large expenditure to buy right oul; (4) the inevitable pauperism of the coming generation of Maoris if the above waste continues.