LAND SETTLEMENT REFORM.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 7, 8 January 1907, Page 2

LAND SETTLEMENT REFORM.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Re your local on Saturday last, notice was taken of the fact that staff surveyors were carrying out native land subdivision, which hitherto had been done by licensed surveyors; but the exact point was not made clear. It was not because the Government was usurping work outside their sphere of operations in treating native lands as Crown lands, but that in carrying out this work they were allowing applications for isolated sections of Crown lands for settlement to pile up, and keeping bona fide settlers waiting for years to get on the waste lands of the Crown, which has been the ease for the past 30 years; and delays are being accentuated by undertaking native subdivisional work which can be done outside the staff, and leaving other work, which in the wiedom of the Government can only be by staff men. It is past all comprehension of sane and sensible men that one tenure of Crown laud can be carried out by licensed surveyors; but if opened out on another tenure it can ( only be done by staff men; and it is not the defendant that is to blame, but the system, therg prevents appropriation, which the chief surveyors could pay outside men to carry out surveys in districts where they know licensed men are working, the consequence being that land selected a3 unsurveyed, if the applicant planks down the cost of survey which goes against his rental till the whole amount is absorbed, gets his land, and gets on it very shortly after applying for it, while his unfortunate neighbour waits for months and years before he gets his land. And this is not the whole of the trouble. A man wishing to take up land for his sons, near to his own homestead, applies for a section which may be a misera'Siy poor one, except for a little swamp, which will require labour to make it reproductive. Under ordinary circumstances, if there is no other application, he gets the section; but delays are dangerous. If the applicant waits for years he may get sick and tired of waiting, and leave the district. If he is a settler wishing to keep his family abouf him he becomes the prey of land sharks and blackmailers, who make a living by putting in applications for land, not to settle on, but to blackmail bona fide settlers. The true settler either has to buy off the other applicant, who never intended to settle, or wait for yeare and find at the ballot the otner applicant gets the land, and he is to pay him to hand it over to his son. These matters and scores of other land transactions that require rectifying, altering, and reforming, are well known to the profession, but the trouble is that a Minister for Lands is a man who has been a fanner, and therefore is supposed to know everything, whereas he actually knows nothing of the numbers of reforms that are required. The Native Minister says: Put on the staff men and carry out native subdivision. The Minister for Lands says: Right! It shall be done. But he does not seem to know that this means dislocating the land settlement of the colony. Hence the public generally should hail with satisfaction the fact that there are gentlemen spending their time, not in trying to fleece the public, but, to try and push on with expeditions and economise live progressive legislation for the land settlement of the colony as a whole. —I am, etc., P. E. CHEAL.