The Price of Land.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IX, Issue 140, 19 May 1885, Page 2

The Price of Land.

[Wairarapa Daily. 2 From time to time a controversy springs up m the press on the price of Crown lands offered for sale, and occasionally it finds a faint echo m Parliament. The one side argues that the people should be put upon the land, even if it had to be given to them, while the other has it that the Government should not soil an acre except by public auction ; and when these assertions have been made, the one professes that its own view is the liberal one, whilo the other plays into the hands of land sharks, and the said other replies that to give away land, or what is next door to it, is a phas» of liberalism that the Colony can'do very well, without.' There is, no doubt, a great deal to be said on both sides. Neither is absolutely wrong, : yet open to t good deal of correction. In the early days of settlement the Provincial Government disposed of the bulk of the land either by public auction or by throwing it open for free selection at an upset price that left a fair profit to them. It was b)- this means that they were enabled to carry out their public works, and to subsidise Road Boards. Had it not been for the land fund many of the important roads m the colony would still be m an unfinished state, and numbers of dangerous rivers remain unbridged. It was through the land fund, for instance, that the rivers m the Wairarapa Valley were bridged, and the majority of them, too, after Parliament had withdrawn the Ciistoms Revenue from the Provincial Governments. We think that this of itself is a sufficiently strong argument to show that a' fair price should be charged for Crown Lands, and that. to sell them at a very low rate would simply retard settlement, as there would not be sufficient means to construct roads and bridges. The revenue which the Colony derives from other sources is required m other directions, so that at least the bulk of the money must necessarily come from the one source. The system of selling by public auction is,, however, a failure, except from a pub- ; iic revenue point of view. The sales of land on the Waimate plains and m other districts on the West Coast, broiight m enormous auinn, and there were one or j two instances m which agricultural land ; was run up to £16 per acre. The conse- "j quence was that, although nearly all the i roads were formed, a large number of j the purchasers were unable to hold the land, and when they disposed of it they did not get anything near the original price, with all the improvements thrown m. The upshot of the keen competition is that there is a great deal of distress on the West Coast, .and that large numbers of farms are m the market without buyers. It is the duty of the Government to avoid evils of this sort, though we confess it would be difficult to find a remedy. The Government will do .its duty to the country by charging a fair and reasonable price — a price that will leave such a profit that all necessary works m the neighborhood where the block is being sold may bo carried out. To sell at a loss would be doing an injustice to older settlers, and even to those who are not landholders at all, because they, as forming a portion of tho tax-paying population, have a right to hoc that the public estate is not Rqunndpred, and that what may perhaps be i Allftri a liberal policy does not impose additional burdens on the whole Colony,