The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR P.M. Resurrexi. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1881.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 4009, 3 November 1881, Page 2

The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR P.M. Resurrexi. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1881.

One thing is very certain. There must be ere long a change in the incidence of our taxation. Custom and Excise duties are the most vicious kind of imposts. They press hardest on the poorest. They are costly in collection and wasteful in providing means of revenue. All this cry that we hear about protection and free trade is the result of this excise and customs form of.taxation. The land is the proper source of revenue for State maintenance. It was so beld in times past in England, until the landholder shifted the burden on the people. He was not at this time a land owner, it must be remembered, as he held his estate as a tenant from the Crown. The holding of land has changed in practice, although not in theory, in the present day. Why land in New Zealand should pay largely towards the colonial revenue is clear, from the fact that the people all are taxed, and taxed heavily to pay the interest on the money expended by the Government in New Zealand to improve the estates of private owners. This matter has been put very forcibly by Mr Sealey in his pamphlet, "Are we to stay here?" At page 67 he says: — "The New Zealand and Australian Land Company hold in Canterbury, Otago, and Southland some 340,000 acres of freehold land, whilst the whole of the land sold to date in these provinces, is only 6,000,000 acres, so that the above company actually owns about one-twentieth of the whole. There has been spent in railway construction in these three provinces, according to the latest returns, about £5,473,000, a twentieth part of which sum has therefore been spent practically for the benefit of the company's estates by the people of New Zealand. Or to put it in another way, the company will have bought the Canterbury estates at £2 per acre, and the Otago and Southland ones at £1 per acre—say £500,000 the whole purchase money; this land they expect to sell at an average of about £8 per acre." Thus far we can with safety follow Mr Sealey—but not to the length of saying that the increment is wholly due to the expenditure of the public money. When this land is subdivided aud sold at a profit, it will, not be too much to say that half its enhanced value however will arise from the expen-

diture of public money. It is this merement we want to touch, and what the landholders are determined to prevent us from doing. There are many more striking cases of enhanced value of properly in New Zealand through the expenditure of borrowed money than the one cited, but Mr Sealey's illustration gives us a peg whereon to hang the statement that a change wants to be made in the incidence of our taxation.