LAND SUPPLIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LII, Issue 25, 29 January 1921, Page 10

LAND SUPPLIES.

THE POSITION IMPROVING. (Special to WELLINGTON, this day. A fairly drastic clause in last session's Land Act will eventually make it difficult for persons holding large areas of land in an unimproved state. It will pay them ibetter to subdivide or to improve, otherwise their prospective unearned increment will be appropriated in yearly instalments through the penal land tax. Your correspondent inquired of the Hon. D. H. Guthrie, Minister of Lands, if this clause has yet become operative. The Ministerial reply was that the preliminaries were being undertaken, but no direct step had yet been taken. "However," he added, "we feel the benefit of the clause in the greater readiness of owners of large unimproved areas to submit their properties for soldier settlement at a reasonable figure. The position generally in regard to the supply of improved and unimproved land for settlement has become more satisfactory. We have more land on offer, and the prices asked are much more reasonable than has hitherto been the case, and nearer to the productive value of the land. The difficulty of finance is to a certain extent responsible for the improvement in the purchase outlook. We have steadily set our faces against buying land for the soldiers at a price which will not give them a chance to make a living with a proper margin, and having regard for the reduction in prices of our principal products in the future, we will not launch out on the basis of recent high prices. When we have been asked, as we have often been asked, to pay up to £120 an acre for dairying land, our reply has been a straight-out 'No.' "