HASTY PROPHETS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 9, 10 July 1909, Page 4

HASTY PROPHETS.

— Is the graduated land tax so magnificent a success that it is absolutely ruining this country? or is it so abject a futility as to be practically a dead letter? The first of these alternatives has so often been impressed upon us by critics who profess to know all about it, that it is comforting to have the opposite view urged with at least equal assurance by those who are perhaps equally well qualified to express an opinion. "»Some of the speakers claimed," we were informed yesterday in a cable message dealing with the debate on the no-confidence motion in the Commonwealth Parliament, "that the progressive land tax in iSTew Zealand had failed in its objects of breaking up large estates and keeping land values down. 1 They predicted a similar failure here." The haste of social prophets, whether their messages be of disaster or of triumph, is really amazing. They know all about a thing without so much as looking at it or allowing it time to operate. Admittedly the graduated taxation which was instituted in 1891 and amended in various ways during the next twelve years, accomplished very little. It produced the usual amount of talk about ruining the country, but it was both mild and easy to evade, and the general result was that it left the country and the large estates very much as it found them. But in the lessons which they profess to draw from New Zealand, the speakers in the Federal Parliament cannot possibly be referring to the antiquated legislation of 1891 to 1903, which was superseded two years ago. The references must be to the latest developments of our policy, which were brought about under the present Government. But surely these Australian critics would not speak go confidently of what our legislation has done or failed to do if they realised that the Act in question was only passed in 1907, that no part of it came into operation before the Ist April, 1908, and that the part which especially concerns the cities only takes effect during the year ending the 31st Marcn, 1910. How is it possible in July, 1909, to gauge tho effect of a measure which has been in partial operation for a little more than a year, but is not in complete operation yet? That is one answer to these critics, and another is that though the data for determining the effect of the Land and Income Assessment Act of 1907 upon land values are as yet quite insufficient, the effect of the measure in promoting the disintegration of some of the large estates is patent to observers who have the advantage of watching from a less remote station than the Federal Parliament in Melbourne. Land has come into the market which might otherwise have been kept back indefinitely, and at the same time the owners have not been subjected to such urgent pressure that they had to sell at an undervalue. The more popular method of decrying the operations of the Act was illustrated in the interview with Mr. Newton King, of New Plymouth, which we published yesterday. Referring to his recent visit to the Old Country, Mr. King said :—: — "The graduated land tax here is always thrown up in one's face at Home. Everybody in the financial world refers to it. This has no doubt served to scare off iuvestoru. " How far, in his opinion, the scare is reasonable, 'Mr. King did not say, but we have no doubt that he is correct in referring to the existence of the scare as a fact which must be taken into account. It must be remembered, however, that what now appears to everybody the very mild instalment of reform introduced in 1891 was even more loudly proclaimed at the time to have a similarly deterrent effect. Yet on that occasion the nerves of capital soon settled down again, and we believe that the same thing will happen now. To taxation of this kind Shakespeare's remark that ''the sense of death is most in apprehension," has a. very close application. It is not the thing itself so much as the anticipation that terrifies. There is nothing very deadly in the latest turn of tho screw of graduated taxation, but there is the fear that the process may go indefinitely further. iMr. Hogg's nn fortunate speech in tho 'Address-in-Reply debate was therefore just the thing to do more mischief than the Act itself, and his retirement should have done something to Testore confidence. He does not know how to handle tho capitalists as if he loved them; yet that ii the only way to tax them without unnecessary fuss and friction.