MR FISH'S FIGURES.

Evening Star, Issue 9153, 7 June 1893, Page 4

MR FISH'S FIGURES.

TO TIIK KDITOK. Sin,—l have read with much interest and profit Mr Fish's very able address, as reported in your issue of Saturday. I have taken the trouble to examine his figures as to the loss entailed by the land policy of the present (iovernment, and find that, if he is correctly reported, lie is somewhat out in his calculation, though the error is not at all serious considering the large amounts involved. To begin with, the annual rental at 4 per cent, of a block of 040 acres, valued at £1 an acre, would not be £2f> 10s as stated by Mr Fish, but £2o 12s. The rental consequently of 1,000 such blocks would be t'25,6'00. Kven at Mr Fish's own figure (£2.1 10s) the rental of 1,000 blocks would be, not £25,800 as he states, but £25,500. In the next calculation, i.e., as to the annual rental of 1,000 blocks, when the value has risen to £5 an acre, I make it £12,800. and not £12,900 as given by him. If £25,000 be deducted from £128,000 it leaves an annual loss of £92,400 as against £93,200 given by Mr Fish. Multiplying this by fourteen, the number of years of the second period, it makes an aggregate loss of £1,293,000, or £11,200 less than the amount (£1,304,800) given by Mr Fish. Similarly with the next set of calculations, the annual loss for the third period of fourteen years would not be £IBO,OOO, but £184,800. Again multiplying by fourteen, the. aggregate for the third period would be £2,587,200, and adding this to the aggregate sum for the second period, we find the loss to the State would be £2,079,600, or £234,800 less than the amount given by Mr Fish. Multiplying this last figure by three, agreeably to Mr Fish's final assumption, the ultimate discrepancy between his calculation and the figures I have submitted amounts to very nearly three-quarters of a million. This, however, is, after all, a mere trifle where the figures reach to ten millions of money. The real weakness of Mr Fish's contention on this point seems to me to lie in the fact that his argument is, based entirely on a series of assumptions. The value of these calculations depends entirely on the reasonableness of the assumptions on which they are based, and I am very doubtful myself as to whether Mr Fish's long series of assumptions would successfully bear the application of this test. I cannot claim to know very much about land or land values, but it seems scarcely agreeable either to reason or experience that land should increase to ten times its value throughout the whole colony in twenty-eight or even forty-two years. It is not uncommon to hear of a temporary rise in land values in some particular locality, but an all-round permanent increase of this sort is surely not a common experience. I cannot help thinking that, careful as he usually is, Mr Fish has in this instance somewhat overshot the mark. —I am, etc., IXTERKBTKU. Diuiediii, June (i.