LAND VALUES.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 December 1919, Page 6

LAND VALUES.

j AN INTERESTING STATEMENT, j A correspondent to the Otago Daily Times makes the following interesting statement concerning land values:—■ I see the Labor candidates have a great deal to say about the effect which conscripting the value given to land by thij community would have. I wonder what community they'mean. I can assure them that if the value of lan.l was dependent- on the people of New Z.-alaid you could not give the land uway, far less value it, or sell it, or conscript it either. Let ino illustrate by giving the history of a farm I know well. This firm was bought from, J understand, the first holder somewhere about 40 years at £3 per acre. Ido not know exactly what the £3 was for, but for the sake of argument, let me assume that £1 represented what the vendor paid to the Government for the property. In it;, original state that £1 representel the work which had been done on it, and that C 1 was profit. The buyer at once began improving the farm—roading, ditching, fencing, burning, etc., etc., so that it stood in his books as costing £l6 10.-", noney raised on it aa-1 taken out of his business, and whateve,: was taken off it was put back on the land The farm was quite well worth £l6 10s an acre, as those were the flays when it paid to grow wheat to be sent Home, and to grow oats to send to Melbourne, but the price of wheat fell so low that it did not pay to send Home, and Victoria placed a duty on oats, which put her ports against our produce, au>i land came down with a run, so much so that this place, which cost the owner £IP 10s and which had to be sold, brought C(i 10s per acre. And what was the state of labor at that time ? There were soup kitchens and charitable aid works in the town. Then the directors in Edinburgh if the New Zealand and Australian Land Company decided to try a ship load of frozen meat. They fitted up the ship Dunedin with the necessary machinery and instructed their manager in Dunedin to load her when she came out. The shipment turned out a success, and this was the beginning of our fat lamb trade. This affected the price ot land to such an extent that the same farm was sold at £lO per acre. It remianed at this figure for some years until at last a test of sending butter and cheese was made. I have seen butter remain in one of the Duneilin stores for months. Nobody wanted butter; everybody had as much as he wanted, so that ultimately it was sent Home as ordinary cargo, and was sold in London at 4V[.d per lb.—not much for the poor farmer's wife's work, and I think you will admit there was not much community value in that. The trial of sending butter and cheese Home in the cool chambers proving a success, was tlie beginning of our export of these articles. The export of them and of frozen meat has been making of the present New Zealand. From this you will sec we are entirely dependent on the community of Great Britain—that is, England and Scotland—for the community values of land. Ido not include Ireland, as she is, like New Zealand, ent#ely dependent on Great Britain for the value of her land. I may state that the buyer of the farm at £lO per acre spent fully another £2 per aero in further improvements, and that before the war £2O would not have been accepted for the property, Another thing on which the Labor candidates ring the changes is. that it is labor that has made the land values. To turn round and say that, after labor has been paid for its services, it made the land is an absurdity. The miners might as well, after having been paid for mining the coal, insist on being paid for the coal also. The one would be as . honest us the other.