Evening Post. SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1913.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 17, 23 August 1913, Page 4

Evening Post. SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1913.

TO BREAK UP BIG ESTATES ■"■" ■»-» ■» In the House of Representative* on Wednesday the Prime Minister, Mr. Massey, expressed the belief thftt in less than ten years there will not be & single large estate left in New Zealand. As a profession of faith this is interest* ing, but it Carries fio weight unless backed by facts. This omission, we must confess, has caused us disappoint' ment, because we had hoped that by now the Prime Minister would have been fully armed with figures to prove, not only that rapid subdivision is going on, but that the subdivision is resulting in close settlement. There is sometimes & tendency to regard these two things as one, but no greater mistake can possibly be made. Our hope thai) some pertinent official data would be forthcoming was based on. a passage in. the Financial Statement, which, dealing with owners of freehold land whose individual holdings reach 10,000 acres or more, stated that such owners sold 811,000 acres during the two years between 31st March, 1910, and Slat March, 1912. Now, no one knows better than the Prime Minister that to take & minimum of 10,000 acres, without regard to quality, is to evade the issue. In dairying country 5000 acres is a very much bigger estate than 10,000 acres, or even 20,000 acres, of third quality sheep land. A calculation based on*, one area (not even a graduation of acreages) is no test at all. It would have been quite as sensible *if Mr. Massey, in selecting his Ministers, had gone round with' a tape and measured the superficies of their cfaniums. It would be just as easy to calculate a Minister's intelligence Irom the external dimensions of his skull, as it would be to infer, from the acreage of an unspecified piece of land, its productive capacity. It was probably a sense of the insufficiency of his data that caused the Minister for Finance to footnote his Budget figures with the following sentence: " I'or the year ended 31st March, 1913, details of all subdivisions which have taken place are not yet to hand, but from present indications I think 2 am warranted in saying that the process of subdivision has of late been considerably accelerated." This sentence encouraged us in the hope that the Minister for Finance or the Prime Minister intended to show the changes in land Ownership ,4& St-tttlh csnsxj&<>xi6!£^w£U .which

would involve a graduated scale of unimproved and improved values as well as of area-a. Models — not perf<>ct — of such a return are to be found occasionally in the Parliamentary papers of the last three or four years, but unfortunately the best samples of the thing required eeem to have been specially moved for, and have not been treated a» regular annual returns. It is information which would certainly throw a great deal of light on the tendency of subdivisions, and some light on the extent to which these subdivisions are resulting in close settlement ; and, as such, 1 it ia information which members of Parliament and the public ought to have. It is at present no argument for some member to get up and say that an area of 200,000 or 300,000 acres of big estates in his district has been subdivided within such-and-such a time. Everyone knows that the increased graduated land tax, like the old one, causes family subdivisions of land, the object of which is to reduce taxation; but the cutting tip of a 12,000acre block between a father and two sons does not necessarily add a single settler to the soil, though a few of these transactions would make an imposing list. Close settlement is another matter altogether. If complete figures were shown through all the grades of area and value, some useful deductions might be drawn, and that is why w« regret that the Prime Minister's pious hope, that within teii years the "large estates" (whatever that may mesn) will have disappeared, is not fortified with facto ehowing the rat© at which they are diminishing to-day. The statement, made in. a recess speech, that in twelve months 2286 settlers had acquired holdings averaging 230 acres, indicates what everyone knows— that, owyig to a variety of causes, particularly the prices 6f land, subdivision is in progress j but this fact, if it is el fact, ia too bald for analysis or for comparison with other years. Nothing is more certain than that purchases of many acres of high sheep country in Nelson or Marlborough, under the Land for Settlements Act, in a time ,of financial tightness, will not solve the question of breaking up highly improvable estates in other parts whose desirability lies not in their area, but in their unrealised productive capacity. Nor is any light thrown on this, the most important problem of all, by official figures dealing with sales of estates over the 10,000 acre limit. That Mr. Massey sees these things clearly is indi> cated by his remark on Wednesday that a man should not be allowed to hold improvable land in an unimproved condition, and that it would be necessary to discriminate between "the man who is .holding unoccupied land and the man who is making good use of his land." This is a good principle, and the only subject of wonder is that Mr. Massey has not yet delivered the goods. With wonderful promptness ho gave us last session machinery for voluntary subdivision and sale by big landowners (through the Government) to small settlers, on a basis of deferred payment. This session we have heard nothing about this voluntary sale machinery. Last year it was starred in the Financial Statement, which this session is silent about it. Does, that mean that the Prime Minister's bait has 'attracted no fish at all? Whether this bft so or not, the experience has surely been sufficiently discouraging to convince Mr Massey that no scheme of the kind has any chance of practical success unless it embodies the power to compel. By compulsory sale of im« provable land, the State guaranteeing to the owner in all cases the land-tax valuation, and paying him also any surplus where the prices realised are in excess of that valuation, the Government could not only subdivide but could also closely settle every large estate in New Zealand without borrowing a penny. And that is a result which neither Mr. Massey's graduated land tax nor Mr. Seddon's Land for Settlements Act would ever achieve, in either ten years or fifty.