THE OTAGO LAND SALE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 37, 7 October 1871, Page 9

THE OTAGO LAND SALE.

The “ Tuapeka Times ” of Thursday last has the following remarks upon the recent extensive land sale in Otago : The deed is done ! Proposed by the Provincial Executive, approved of by the Provincial Council, and agreed to by the Waste Lands Board, 45,003 acres of the public estate have passed into private hands. When first the proposed sale was mooted, we protested against it as loudly as we could. Several of our correspondents living in the neighbourhood of the land gave timely warning of the bad effects which would result from the sale to the Mount Benger district, but all 10 no effect. The Government wanted money and cared not how it was obtained —so instead of acknowledging their incapacity for the position they held, they sacrificed this laud. If any act could more forcibly than another prove provincialism to be in its dotage, so far as Otago is concerned, we think it will be agreed that this last act of the Government is proof indisputatble. We most sincerely trust that this will be the last opportunity the Reid Government or any other Government will have, of sacrificing the public estate. The liberal Government that the Tuapeka people feasted and who almost sent us crazy in our admiration of them, so soon to prove themselves poor, weak, and miserable —without a single shift in them. What awful simpletons we must have been not to observe the hollowness of their professions. The Government which made the land question its hobby, and whose note of warning was the repeal of the Hundreds Regulations Acts, before it has been more than a few months in office sells, in defiance of law aud reason,without competition, and in one block, 45,000 acres of good agricultural and pastoral land at the upset price of twenty shillings per acre. Oh no—not quite so much, but at the exceptionally low price of fifteen shillings and sixpence per acre. Seventy square miles of Otago’s fair country for thirtyfive thousand pounds! And what does the district or the province get in its stead ? Nothing—absolutely nothing. The seventy square miles which have just passed from the hands of the public must be looked upon as the price of Provincial extravagance—that fine country has been sacrificed to keep up the wig and gown and all the attendant mimicry of the “ House ” —been sacrificed too by then who were the friends of the people,

the reputed retrenchment Government. What, we have asked, will the district get in exchange for this money? Surely it will get that quagmire of a road by the Island block made passable—even ten per cent, of the amount would go a long way towards making that portion of the main up-country road passable. But no, not a penny of it will be expended in the district—not a penny of it in the province, for it has already been absorbed to meet the Government deficiency. It is melancholy to think that the Government of this province is in the hands of men so incompetent, and that our Provincial Councillors would sanction such an act of gross injustice upon the people—an act at once opposed to the spirit of the land laws of the province, and repugnant to the feelings of every colonist who wishes to see the country inhabited by a thriving population, and not monopolised by capitalists.