REFORMERS AND LAND TAX.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 230, 28 September 1929, Page 8

REFORMERS AND LAND TAX.

The members of the Reform Party are certainly doing their best to produce an unfavourable impression of the Land Tax Bill. Mr. Campbell told the House on Thursday that the Bill would have a disastrous effect on land values, that it would not harm the rich man, but would hurt the small farmer, and that it would swell the army of unemployed. Mr. Waite said the Bill would "drive capital out of the country," Mr. Macmillan warned his hearers that "our credit on the London money market would suffer. ,, Mr. Jones asked the House to contemplate the harrowing spectacle of "huge areas of sheeplands" thrown upon a falling market, with no buyers forthcoming. All this has a curiously familiar tone, and as a matter of fact Conservative politicians and journalists and landowners said precisely these things in denunciation of the land taxes and land for settlement measures of the Seddon era. Yet, as we all know, the landowners were not ruined, the land market was not swamped, capital was not driven from the country, and our credit at Home did not suffer. Yesterday Mr. Coates, after making a pathetic appeal on behalf of the struggling small farmer who is doomed to ruin by the new supertax which he will never have to pay, solemnly warned the House that trade is already falling off and that "unemployment is already affected by the proposals in the Bill," People who can believe that will believe anything. We are not sure that we do not prefer the whole-hearted vituperation with which Mr. D. Jones has relieved his soul. Already he has promised the Prime Minister a glorious immortality if the Bill goes through—"the names of-Ward, Lenin and Trotsky" are to be associated together for all time as the champion robbers and despoilers of history. If the House bad any true sense of the dramatic, the debate should have stopped then and there; for anything that came after Mr. Jones' effort mus* be an anti-climax. And the Bill passed its second reading all the snme.