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Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 216, 22 August 1884, Page 2

If anything were wanted to prove the justice of granting the request of the people of this district for reformation in the present mode of conducting the business of the Native Lands Court it is to be found in the able report which Mr. James Booth, Resident Magistrate, has just forwarded to the Government wherein he says : —The sitting of the Native Land Court, at Gisborne, for some months during the year, has enabled the Natives to put a good deal of land through the Court, and many transactions in the way of sales and leases have, now that clear titles have been obtained, been satisfactorily completed. Whilst referring to the Native Land Court, I think it right to call the attention of the Hon. the Native Minister to the fact that the sittings, as at present held, are indirectly the cause of immense loss of time and money to the Native applicants attending them. In this, as in many other districts, the Native owners of any given block of land are, in times of peace, spread over a very large extent of country. For instance, at the late sitting of the Land Court here many applicants came from distances ranging up to 100 miles, and as the claims of these applicants would be effected by original claims, they were obliged to remain over nearly the whole sitting. It has been proved over and over that if an owner absents himself, trusting to his tribe to protect his interests, he stands a very poor chance of getting his failshare of land. Besides this loss of time and absence from their cultivations, there is the necessary cost for food, pasturing for horses, &c. During the sitting of the Court here there was little or no drunkenness, and yet the cost to each individual claimant, under the circumstances I have mentioned, must have been enormous. Many men having been here for months have been obliged to sell the land to which they had got a title to pay expenses. The only remedy I can suggest in such cases as I have mentioned is that Courts should be held more frequently, and thus prevent an over-accumulation of work. If the Courts could be held at stated periods and the work could be got through at each sitting in one or two months, there would not be much hardship in the matter; but in the present state of things the claimants must attend at ruinous cost, or run the risk of being left out in the cold, and if, being aggrieved, an application for a re-hearing is sent in, the natural reply is, “You ought to have been there, or have taken care that you were represented.” Coming from an authority on Native matters such as Mr. Booth is, nothing further should be required to ensure the immediate granting of our request for a Resident Native Land Court Judge. The promise of one was made by Mr. Bryce and it is the manifest duty of any party that may come into power to carry out such a promise made by their predecessors.