THE LAND BILL.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 14, 11 October 1907, Page 4

THE LAND BILL.

The discussion of the Land Bill had not proceeded far in the House of Representatives last night before it became clear that the conflict over the terms upon which the lessee-in-perpetuity may acquire the freehold is a conflict between incurably hostile prejudices. On the One side is the party which regards the State as a kind of abstract landlord, a disembodied entity existing only in figures on a balance-sheet, and this party holds that* if the tenant desires the. boon of the freehold, he must pay the present value, as otherwise the State would be defrauded of its interest in the increment of value in the holding. The advocates of the freehold at the original value, on the other hand, claim that the increment does not belong to the State, and that the State has admitted the tenant's ownership of the increment by permitting tenants to borrow v against the goodwill. The unearned increment, say 3 Mr. Massey, is; in most cases, " hard-earned increment," and in many cases—to be precise, in 5491 cases—the tenant is a transferee who has paid for the goodwill, and who, therefore, will be robbed if he has to pay the State the present value,' inasmuch as he would be paying a second time for the goodwill. These, are points of view that resist all attempts at reconciliation, and a solution of the difficulty must be looked for in another direction. The position placed itself in a nutshell at, one point during the discussion.' Mr. Mills had declared that the lessee had no "right*' to "demand" the freehold, which is perfectly time, and Mr. Massey retorted

that "the State should be running after him to give it," which is equally true. The State—whether considered as the disembodied entity we have referred to, or as a multitude of individuals endeavouring to labour together for their mutual advantage—can only benefit from the disappearance of tho lease-in-perpetuity, and, as the State has infinitely more to gain than the tenant by making a change, it is the State ■which should make the overtures and yield the concessions. In insisting on the present value, the State is simply making negotiation impossible, for none of the 5491 transferees can afford to pay for their holding a sum equal to the capital value plus the value of the goodwill which they have already paid fsr, while no lessee-in-perpetuity at all will purchase the freehold when his

title will forbid him to sell it to anybody but a landless, or nearly landless, buyer. The freehold " offer" is, therefore, not a genuine offer, and nothing that was said last night even made it appear so. The Premier persists in asking whether a private landlord would do what Mr. Massey desires the State to do, but no private landlord mortgages his land for 999 years, and the parallel is, therefore, no parallel at all. It is all very well to talk of refusing to wrong future generations by succumbing to the pleas of sentiment, as the Premier talked last night, but the question is not one of sentiment, but of hard business. The:coming generation will not profit much from a present-day friend who insists, on their behalf, on terms that will prevent the accomplishment of what the Government declares to be a work necessary in the coming generation's interests. This is so obvious that common-sense suggests that ,the near future may see the introduction of coercive legislation to force the lessees-in-per-petuity to do what the Government Tnust know they will not do under the terms now offered to them.