TWENTY YEARS OF FAILURE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1244, 28 September 1911, Page 4

TWENTY YEARS OF FAILURE.

A little discussion that took place in tho House yesterday should prove instructive to the country. In Christchurch on September 20 Mr. H.' D. Acland, in a political address, quoted from an advertisement in the Ashburlon Guardian, in which the successful applicant for the Douglas Settlement homestead block offered at auction a 516-acrc farm at Winslow. The property reached £10' an acre at, auction and was withdrawn at' the owner's bid of £-11 -ss. an acre. "Here," commented Mr. Acland, "tho Gov- . eminent was leasing land to a man who owned a farm worth £5160." This statement was referred to in a question to the Minister for Lands, who replied yesterday that the statement was incorrect, and that tho successful applicant for the homestead section was an unmarried lady who owned no land. The Minister was careful, as he usually is, to omit the .essential fact, which in this case is beyond dispute, and is that the young lady was the daughter of the farmer who offered the £5160 farm for sale. One of the Government's newspaper mouthpieces in the South endeavoured to convict Mr. Acland of untruth, and after being driven to admit the undisputed facts, sought to cover up the fact of aggregation by a simulated approval of a landlord that allows industrious families to "earn the reward" of Liberal policy. Mr. Acl\nd pointed out that whatever' I any outsider might say about the case the father considered himself the virtual owner, inasmuch as his advertisement contained a footnote to say that the owner had drawn a Government section, and that his offer of his farm for sale was imperative, as residence on the section was necessary. These facts were mentioned in 3'csterday's discussion. The case is in some respects like the cases of the Mackenzie Country runs, with which the Hon. J. Anstey dealt in the Legislative Council recently; and it illustrates the condition of a party that, after 21 years' perfect freedom to experiment until success is reached, is found unable to draft a sound framework of principles. The Government cries out against land aggregation; it professes to be the special foe of aggregation; yet it has not succeeded in preventing it, and, as the Prime Minister's reply of yesterday showed, it strives, when a case of aggregation, in the broad sense, takes place, to evade the facts and defend tho transaction. We have seen little to approve in Mr. L. Isitt since he came to Wellington, but we feci bound to approve his small contribution to yesterday's discussion. The spirit of the Act, by which he meant the principle of nonaggregation, was, he said, being evaded time after time, and he suggested that the Government and tho Opposition might unite in applying a remedy. The Opposition policy is antagonistic to _ aggregation—the party favours limitation of area of all Crown holdings—indeed, it is from that quarter alone that protests against the violation of the spirit of the land laws can nowadays be expected. The people who were lucky enough to_ draw the Douglas homestead section were of course acting very properly within their rights. But if our "Liberal" friends ever meant anything before they began to keep silence about tho fundamentals of land policy, they meant that they were opposed to aggregation. Yet they maintain a law that permits aggregation, and they become angry and evasive when the "Tories," as they call their critics, remind them of the failure of "Liberalism" after 20 long years to fit itself out with some honest and effective ideas concerning land legislation.

The Christchurch paper already referred to was driven, in its eagerness to assail Mr. Acland, to ' pronounce some opinions that come strangely from a violent, but, on jj now quite clear, entirely inßincero

advocate of Radicalism in land policy. The logic of its animosity forced it to say that "the advantage to the country is the advantage which the individual can enjoy without doing injury to his fellows, and in this instance the well-won success of a family is actually benefiting the whole community." We are not going to disagree with that statement, but we know quite well that this critic will, if necessary, rage next week against family aggregation. It is little incidents dike this which arc perfecting the public's realisation that the Government and its friends are cynically opportunist in big things and little things, from top to bottom. This is what one would expect from a party whose long drift out of the sight of principles was so strikingly brought home to the public by Mr. Fowlds the other day.