A LAND MINE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 283, 28 November 1940, Page 9

A LAND MINE.

DYNAMITE'

SMALL FARMS BILL CRITICS.

(By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, this day,

Describing the Small Farms Amendment Bill as a measure "heavily laden with political dynamite," Mr. Doidge (Nat., Tauranga) declared in the Houle of Representatives yesterday that it was in the truest sense a land mine. There were two vital principles in the bill: First it took away the right of freehold, and secondly it denied access to the highest courts of the land. It sought to wipe out the freehold system and make possible political executives over-riding the judiciary.

The bill, contended Mr. Doidge, humbugged the people, l*cn use although the Minister of Lands had said there was no hidden purpose behind it, he had stealthily engineered in its provisions the policy of complete socialisation. There was nothing in it about the soldier settler. The soldier simply was the stalking horse to take away the freehold. Confiscation was stamped over every clause or every feature of the measure. Conditions when the soldiers returned this time were not goin? to be the same as at the end of the last war. There was a glamour about going on the land in 191 K. but there was 110 glamour about it to-day. The farmers who were there owned the land; it was in their blood, bones and aoul, and much the same applied to their sons. Undsr the heavy weight of taxation and other burdens existing under the Government's legislation, no man wanted to go on the land for a living unless he was a fool. Mr. Doidge said he felt that farmers throughout the country were sincere and spontaneous in their protests. They knew that if the bill went through there would be nothing left for them but to subscribe to a monument to the death of the freehold system and to the last of the free men on the land in New Zealand.

"If the Prime Minister and the Minister in charge of the bill really want us to get down to a concerted effort in the House and in the country," added Mr. Doidge, "then quit this stealthy scheme to socialise New Zealand under the cloak of war effort and let's follow the example of Winston Churchill and you will take the bitterness out of politics in New Zealand."