LAND SUPER TAX

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 744, 17 August 1929, Page 9

LAND SUPER TAX

MR. JONES ATTACKED FARMER AND PENALTIES

(The SUN’S Parliamentary Reporter) WELLINGTON, Friday.

The arguments of Mr. D. Jones (Mid-Canterbury) against the land-supertax were fiercely assailed in the House of Representatives yesterday by Mr. J. McCombs (Lyttelton), who also claimed that six of the present Cabinet Ministers had voted for the mortgage exemption legislation which now they wanted re-

pealed. While Mr. Jones and the Reform Party wanted a hardship clause inserted in the legislation affecting the land-tax, said Mr. McCombs, they should not forget that when the Civil Service “cut” was brought in Reform put in a hardship clause which it had never allowed to operate. If there were to be a hardship clause. Mr. McCombs would be pleased to help the Government to operate it. It seemed odd that in 1929 the battle of '93 should be fought over again, when Ballance substituted the land for the property-tax. Dealing with the hardship part of the question, Mr. McCombs quoted the case of one man whose mortgages totalled £68,000 on a property valued at £47,000. He also instanced cases of men whose farms had big valuations and yet were producing only £3OO to £450 a year. There was something wrong with the land there. He combated Mr. Jones’s suggestion that under the new legislation the city taxpayer would get off more lightly than the country one. When the legislation was brought down, it would be found that the £IO,OOO mortgage exemption would be reduced to £5,000, and the town and country man would be treated alike. Mr. Jones, in quoting the case of the city man with £1,575 income who paid only £l3 Ss 9d income-tax, forgot that his party had made the law that rendered this possible. Seeing that Mr. Jones pointed out such anomalies and was not in favour of such operation of the law, Mr. McCombs wondered whether he would vote for repeal of the legislation. From Reform Mr. McCombs turned his attack to Government members. Six Cabinet Ministers, he said, had in 1924 voted for the mortgage exemption legislation. They were the Hons. E. A. Ransom, G. W. Forbes, T. M. Wilford, W. A. Veitch, P. A. de la Perrelle, and H. Atmore. The Hon. Sir Apirana Ngata had voted with the Labour Party against the legislation, and the Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Ward) had not been in the House at that time. Mr. Jones also claimed, said Mr. McCombs, that the value of land would be affected by the operation of cutting it up. Also, the owner would be subjected to a penal-tax. This would not be so at all, as owners cutting up their land for the Government would be free from the penal-tax.