LAND TAX.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 150, 26 June 1936, Page 8

LAND TAX.

j GRADUATED FORM. i . — j MAY BJE REIMPOSED. CHECK TO SPECULATION. INFLATION OF VALUES. (By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Reporter.) WE LUX G T OX, this day. '"The Government will have to consider seriously reimposing the graduated land tax form of taxation. That should never have been removed." This emphatic declaration was made by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. M. J. Savage, this morning when he was shown a statement from Auckland to the effect that enhanced values were being paid for land. "If there is going to be a land boom there is also going to be a burst," said Mr. Savage. "Our job is to prevent any land boom and to' provide the means by which the people boom and land settlement cannot live bom and land settlement cannot live together. I can see what is happening at the present time. On the strength of the Government being prepared to guarantee a. fair price to the man 011 the land for his produce, there are others who see an opportunity of buying land for the sake of selling it at a profit, just as they did immediately before and after the Great War. Our job is to see that that is not, going to be a payable proposition. We will see that people do not get rich at other people's expense by selling land."

"In shaping our taxation proposals we will have to apply a remedy," declared Mr. Savage. "There is more than one way of preventing a land boom. The graduated land tax should never have been removed, and the Government will have to consider seriously reintroducing it. Other forms of taxation will also have to be considered for tiie purpose of preventing speculation in land values. Ihe man who has done the best out of the land in the past is the man who farmed tiie farmer, rather than the man who farmed the .land. We are out to see that the man who farms the land should make a decent living, and that the other fellow is not allowed to exist."

Mr. Savage said that the same applied to house properties. The past Government spent millions in buying houses for returned soldiers. Instead of building new houses they bought old ones and the prices of houses went miles beyond what they should have. The present Governments policy would not be 011 those lines. "We will build houses," he concluded. "Buying and selling the houses already in existence will not solve the housing problem."

The yield from land taxation in 193.»-3(5 was .£4.~>8.873 ! tlie lowest figure for very many years. In 1934-3;) the yield was £492,500. The trend has been steadily downward since 1929-30,' the yield then having been £1,506,000. In most of the post-war years the land tax, produced at least one million and a half pounds, And in one year, 1920-21, it reached a peak of £1,088*,979, at which the productivity of the tax was nearly four times greater than it is at the present time.