The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1887.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 293, 13 December 1887, Page 4

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1887.

For tht cause that lacks assistance, For tho wrong that needs resistance, For the future in tho distance, And the good that we can do.

Where were the nineteen Auckland members on Monday, when Mr Vincen* Pyke carried through the House at a single sitting another bill appropriating an enormous tract of the public estate as an endowment for the Otago Central Eailway ? Since the begin' riing of the Public Works policy , we have been out-manoeuvred and outwitted by the South. So long as loans were negotiable and the colony could raise millions on the security of its public estate and good name, the iSouth managed to secure the application of tho lion's share of the money to Southern works. At tho end of seventeen* years, wo find the South Island with 1,090 milea of railway constructed out of borrowed money, and tho North Island with only 032 miles of railway, Borrowing, however, has come to an end, and the Ministry make a virtue of reducing expenditure on publio works, yet they connive at the appropriation of recoverable out of tho public estate, for the jjunstructiou of

the Midland Railway, and ttlWanotW bill of a similarly pdi'nioidUa charaote? to pass, alienating the public" latitls and filching the revenue derivable from the lands of Otago. By this ftdroife movement in the South, making the most fertile lands in the country local railway endowments, tho North ia cheated out of the fruits of that protracted struggle which wrested the Crown lands from Provincfalcontrol, and restored them to their rightful own era —the Colonial Government. This victory, however, was not achieved before the most fertile and accessible portions of the provincial estates had been used in creating educational and other endowments, or been sold and the proceeds appropriated to the construction of roads, mitigating the local taxation. When compelled to eurrender these exclusive rights, the Southerners more than compensated themselves out of the Public Works loans so long as the money was going. Now that it has ceased they have set their wits to work to circumvent the Act which declared the land fund to be colonial revenue, and have succeeded through the Midland Railway Act and the Otago Central Railway Extension and Construction Bill, in localising the revenue from Crown lands once more.

It is not merely the prospective value of the Crown lands to sell which is taken under these Acts, but by the alienation of large tracts of the pastoral lands of the Crown the public revenues sustain an immediate loss. Already the Midland Railway Company have selected lands yielding £\ 1,000 a year, and it is stated by Sir Geo. Grey that when their full powers under the new contract have been exercised, £2 1,000 a year, which now passes into the public chest, will go into the coffers of the Company. The Otago Central railway, passing through a good pastoral and mineral territory, will probably divert a still larger sum. The new order of things means, in reality, not that railway construction is to cease, but that it is to cease in the North Island and becarriedononlyin the South Island. The payment is still to be made by the colony, although not directly out of loan ; it will come out of the land revenues instead. Will our members, with all their past experience to guide them—with the flagrant fact that the South has already nearly two miles of railway for one in the North Island, constructed out of moneys furnished by the General Government—will they repeat the blunder of 1870? The future alone can furnish the answer.

We do not believe in this system of giving away the public lands to private companies to build railways which are not the property of the Government when finished. We believe that, whatever may be said in favour of such a system in America and Western Australia, where the last areas of public lands are almost valueless without railways to open them, the Grown lands are too limited here to be used in creating great monopolies. At the same time, if Parliament is determined to continue the public works policy by these means, we cannot afford to stand aloof and allow Otago arid Canterbury to obtain the best of the public lands situated in those districts as local railway endowments, while the proceeds from the Crown lands in the North go into the Colonial Treasury. We believe that the North Auckland line could be constructed in the same manner as the Otago Central and the Midland railways, and it now remains for some Aucklander to become the Vincent Pyke of the North, and lead the way.