Untitled

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 629, 13 August 1851, Page 1 (Supplement)

being at a distance of upwards of thirty miles from Nelson ; and therefore some re= modification of the scheme was absolutely necessary as an act of justice to the land purchasers, especially those who had staked their lives and fortunes in the settlement, and with a view to the present and future prosperity of Nelson. To this end, after a good deal of protracted discussion, a series of resolutions was drawn up by the committee, and agreed to by the resident land purchasers and Company’s Agent, and these resolutions, it was understood, were to form the basis of the adjustment of the differences between the Company and their land purchasers at Nelson. These resolutions provide, among other things that (2)* any purchaser declining to avail himself of the proposed adjustment, or who having availed himself of such adjustment, should still be dissatisfied, should be empowered to refer his claim to arbitration in the settlement or in England, without reference to such reselection, in order that it might be determined by arbitration to what amount of additional compensation, if any, he may be entitled; that(6) a reselection of town and suourban land should take place according to the original order of choice, suppressing the unsold sections, which amounted to more than a moiety of the whole number ; that (7) a town should be laid out at Waitohi as a shipping port to the Wairau district of 1,000 sections of quarter acres, and that the land-pmchasers should be entitled to a quarter of an acre for each landorder, as compensation; that (9) such resident original purchasers, being cultivators, who had by the outlay made on the sections in their occupation debarred themselves of the advantages of the proposed distribution should be allowed to take their rural sections in contiguity to their suburban land ; that (13) the Company should be at liberty to grant increased quantities of inferior land in exchange for rural landorders ; and some other resolutions of minor importance. Acting on these resolutions, seventeen different landholders threw up their sections of rural land, comprising 2,550 acres, and received in exchange under what is called the Consolidation Award, agreeably to the 9th resolution, 3,045 acres of suburban land, a considerable portion of which was worth from £3 to £4 an acre, and all of it of greatly superiorvalue to the sections in the rural districts, besides being entitled to a quarter of an acre in the projected town of Waitohi, and retaining also their Nelson town acres. These claims, so adjusted, might have been fairly considered settled, but in 1849 some of those landowners who had not availed themselves of the arrangement above-mentioned, referred their claims to compensation to arbitration in the settlement, agreeably to the 2nd resolution, and ultimately those whose claims had previously been disposed of under the consolidation scheme, preferred fresh claims to compensation, and the result has been that it was decided that the holders of 71 landorders (including all the resident landowners) comprising 14,200 acres of land, were entitled to compensation to the amount of £12,735 in land scrip. We feel that the above sketch is necessarily very brief and imperfect, but the two points to which we are desirous of directing attention are, first—that those who had previously been compensated by the exchange of their rural for suburban land, the latter being in all cases of greatly superior value, were allowed further compensation in land scrip; secondly — that the compensation is not, as in Wellington, stated to be in so many acres, but in so many pounds worth of scrip. Thus A. throws up his rural land (150 acres) at Nelson and obtains instead 300 acres of suburban land with a section in the projected town at Waitohi, retaining also his Nelson town acre, and is dealared entitled in addition to £l5O worth of land scrip. And while according to the original Nelson scheme the price of the land was fixed at thirty shillings an acre, in many instances the land has been parted with by the Company’s Agents, in exchange for Compensation Scrip, at the rate of five shillings an acre, being one-sixth the original price of land at Nelson, and one-fourth the lowest price for which, by Act of Parliament, land may be sold in New Zealand, so that the £12,735 worth of land scrip which, according to the original price of Nelson land, would represent 8490 acres, at the reduced price of ss. per acre would represent 50,940 <*ereB. Jt is true that, in some instances, suburban land in the vicinity of Nelson has been taken at £3 and £4 per acre in exchange for land scrip, but the above statement shows the working of the system if uniformly acted upon. But the most glaring case of compensation at Nelson, a case which has attracted the most general observation, is that of Mr. Duppa, who is understood to be in partnership with Mr. Fox

in his sheep and cattle stations ; it is moreover remarkable as having been decided during Mr. Fox’s late visit to Nelson. Mr. Duppa was originally a land owner at Wellington. but aflp’’wards settled at Nelson This gentleman threw up, as we understand, eight sections of country land in the Wellington district, retaining the town acres, and, receiving one hundred acres of suburban land at the Waimea worth about £3 per acre, preferred a special claim to the Company for compensation for the remainder of his land. According to the arrangement made with the Wellington land-owners (supposing the land at the Waimea equal to the average of two country sections in this settlement, for which £2OO had been paid) Mr. Duppa would have been entitled to reselect six hundred acres of available country land, or their equivalent in value in town acres belonging to the private estate of the Company, (the country section being taken at one hundred pounds, the town land at its current market value) according to his order of choice, and to have received in addition, as compensation, nine hundred acres of land, and if, for his own convenience, he was allowed to take his land in another settlement, then the principle established at Wellington should have decided the case, and Mr. Duppa would have received fifteen hundred acres (including compensation), or according to the price of land at Nelson, 1,000 acres, for the six sections thrown up. The Company’s Agent seems, however, to have thought otherwise, and although the case was referred to arbitration, it is reported that the arbitrators were not allowed to go into the merits of the case, but were simply called upon to decide whether the sum of £2,500 claimed by Mr. Duppa, or of £2,000 which the Company’s Agent was willing to allow, should be awarded. The decision of the arbitrators is stated to have been in favour of the lesser amount, and £2OOO of land scrip was granted by the Company’s Agent to Mr. Duppa in satisfaction of his claim, and it is said was, with the consent of that Officer, forthwith exchanged by him for one compact block of eight thousand acres of land at Wairau, including, as we are informed, twenty-one surveyed sections which had been offered for selection at thirty-shillings an acre, and from its position commanding a back run of equal extent. This is the current version which we have received of this compensation affair. We leave the Company’s Agent to explain by what alchemy six hundred acres of unavailable land (or we presume they would not have been abandoned) have been transmuted into £2,000 worth of land scrip, still more how this amount of worthless land in the Principal district has been transformed into one of the largest and most valuable sheep stations in the Wairau, and in contiguity with surveyed rural land, for we confess it is fairly beyond our powers of comprehension ; the process may be worked out according to Fox, but not according to Cocker. Of course it is not to be supposed that Mr. Fox, as Company’s Agent, was biassed by any feeling in favour of his partner, when he allowed a claim for £6OO to swell to £2OOO, but nevertheless there is the fact, and any one who chooses to ascend a moderate eminence which commands an extended view of the Wairau plain, may enjoy the prospect on the one hand of a valuable run in one compact block of 8000 acres of land, commanding a back run of equal extent, for which only six hundred pounds was paid in the first instance, and on the other, of sections to the amount of 8000 acres belonging to absentees, for which twelve thousand pounds were originally paid, but which, being divided by their selection according to order of choice, are comparatively of little value, and which, being hemmed in on every side by stock stations, are virtually confiscated, since no man would be mad enough to attempt to cultivate them under such circumstances, and it would be useless to try and let them for pasturage, as 150 acres, though a large extent for cultivation, forms a perfectly insignificant fraction of a run, which generally contains an area of some thousand acres. It remains to be seen whether, in Sir George Grey’s opinion, such an arrangement can be fairly classed among the “ bond fide dealings which may have taken place with the Company’s lands under the management of the Company’s Agents, but which are at variance with the Instructions of 1846 respecting the Crown lands,” which, by the dissolution of the Company, are now in force in this province, or whether it is to be considered as one of those Jobs which in the opinion of the Company’s Agent it is expedient to get quietly settled and afterwards legalized by a Nominee Ordinance; whether in short this is not the act of an unjust Steward who, in his desire to make to himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, has been guilty of wasting and spoiling his master’s goods. Our object in making these remarks is to direct attention to the extravagant manner

in which, if we are correctly informed, compensation appears, in some instances, to have been granted to the prejudice of the colony, and in Mr. Duppa’s case to what we believe to be an unjustifiable extent; and we think we are entitled to ask, if Mr. Duppa’s claim is to be made a precedent, what is to prevent claims of other original land purcuasers from swelling in a similar ratio.

Committee Uml>era re * er t 0 reB °lu ti ons of the