ONE HUGE FAMILY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 285, 2 December 1925, Page 12

ONE HUGE FAMILY.

RETURNED SOLDIERS' LANDS GOVERNMENT'S CROWN TENANTS. LANDS DEPARTMENTS RESPONSIBILITIES. Speaking of the Lands Department's responsibilities in regard to returned soldiers a* well a.s Crown tenants, the Hon. A. D. McLeod, Minister of Lands, mentioned casually yesterday to a deputation that tho Press and general public .lid not realise the significance of some of his recent remarks on the subject. Tlie investment oi the Department in lands amounted to £52.000.000. Of that sum £;J_,000.000 was in connection witli returned soldier settlement, with the result that since 1018 the Department's assets had doubled. It had been contended that such a departmental undertaking should be run by commercial men, and to a point the Minister agreed, because the Department was running a concern which was about equal to all the stock and station business of the country put together—practically all built up in six years. Tn returned soldier settlement some £20,000,000 was spent, and the Minister thought that the losses would not be £4,000,000. Advances on current accounts in that connection ran between £0.000.000 and £7.000,000, and there were 13,000 different accounts. . It was a big thing to control, hut the Minister believed they could see "daylight," and that there would be little room for complaint in another year. The machine was beginning to work as he wanted it to work. There were the misfits and hopeless amongst those who had taken up land, and they would hav e to find something else to do. Th, Government could not go on carrying lame dogs and run the settlement policy on business lines. It was not generally known, he continued, that there * were some 200 settlers on the Department's books who were in ill-health, and who were on their backs with nervous, paralytic and other breakdowns. Their wives and children were trying to earrv on upon farms, and in those cases the Department had not charged a penny for rent. If, however, the land settlement business were run on purely commercial lines those people would all be drawing charitable aid. The Department did not throw them out: neither d'd its officers.

There was a huge family of Crown tenants on the Department's books which was a "nice proportion," as there were only 90,000 settlers in the rural parts of' the Dominion. The Department's staff number well over 2000, yet ten years a_o all that were wanted were engineers, as then the Department did not handle the money part of the business. Since then, however, tbe Lands Department had become a huge commercial concern.