The Evening Star TUESDAY, JUNE 17, 1902.

Evening Star, Issue 11606, 17 June 1902, Page 4

The Evening Star TUESDAY, JUNE 17, 1902.

Mb A. L. D. Fraser, the member for Napier, addressed his con-

lijsnd for stituents on June 9 inst., Settlements and considering that he gives Legislation, a general support to the Government in the Home, subjected several of their policy measures to not altogether favorable criticism. The opinions of the honorable gentleman are not of much interest or importance in this part of the Colony, and we shonld not have referred to his anti-sessionul speech but that he spoke out very plainly and sensibly as to tie operation of the Land for Settlements Acts, tie administration of which he unreservedly condemns. The settlement of the land, Mr Fraser very truly declares, is one of the most vitally important questions of tie hour in New Zealand. Under the Acts the Government had little directly to do with the administration, the acquirement of private estates for settlement being vested in the Hoard of Land Purchase Commissioners. This Board the honorable gentleman denounced as having been “ au absolute fraud.” He admitted that this was a very grave charge to make, but he was prepared to prove it to the hilt. He had gone, he said, to Wellington about properties in the Hawke’s Bay district offered to the Government at fair prices—one a block lying between Napier and Hastings, with the railway running through it. A representative of the Board was sent up to inspect this property, and got. as far as the steps of the Masonic Hotel and ro further. He said that the place had been Hooded, and declined to visit the property, although it was pointed out to him that all danger had been obviated by effective river protective works, which had cost £IO,OOO. The Board, Mr Fraser implied, had evidently come to a foregone conclusion, and would rather fight in the courts for such estates as the Forest Gate than acquire desirable properties which the owners were willing to sell on fair terms. Their object, he asserted, was to keep down the price of land in Hawke’s Bay, and the result had been that the Land for Settlements Act had become a “byword and a nightmare” in the district, instead of the beneficent measure it was intended to bn. Touching thq general policy of the Act, the honorable gentleman affirmed that he would -give place to no one in New Zealand in supporting this, but he considered the very last thing that the Government ought to do was to take land on compulsion. He believed the provisions of the Public Works Act were amply sufficient to meet ordinary cases, without resorting to the compulsory clauses of the Land for Settlements Act. Referring to his action in (he House last session in reference to the Amendment Bill, Mr Fraser supported his then contention that each one of the family of an owner whose estate was acquired compulsorily shonld be allowed to select 500 acres in one block. He considered that this would he a just provision, but it was vehemently opposed by the Premier, on the plea that it would break down the whole system, and was accordingly rejected. The member for Napier proceeded to state that he had drawn a plan showing a continuous block of land from Napier to Takapau, taking the railway line as his centre, and comprising six or seven thousand acres on each side of it, not picking out the eyes of the country, but showing a continuous area. These lands he had proposed should be acquired and opened up for settlement, and he had submitted that the scheme, since it provided that only a portion of each estate shonld be acquired, would take out of the transaction “the sting known as confiscation,” He showed his plan to the Premier, who highly approved, but said he would have to consult the Land Purchase Commissioners, and then summoned the very same gentleman who, as previously mentioned, had got as far as the steps of the Masonic Hotel on a visit of inspection t<> a Hawke’s Bay property. That gentleman at once “ sat upon ” the proposal, and would have nothing to do wdth it. The importance of his scheme, Mr Fraser repeated, was that the eyes of the country would not have been taken, and that those who occupied allotments would have had the benefit of the railway and the roads, to which, ho contended, small settlers were most entitled, and thus ail objections would have been obviated. This, however, did not suit the policy of the Board, and the Premier allowed them to overrule his own expressed opinion, although clearly he had power to direct that the block should be acquired. It is to be noted that Mr Fraser in this address, as in the House, takes exactly the same line of argument as Captain Russell has consistently done in reference to the compulsory clauses of the Land for Settlements Act. When the Consolidation Bill was before the House in 1900 the then Leader of the Opposition moved to the effect that where an owner of land has children there should be reserved from compulsory sale certain areas for each, accordin/ In a prescribed scale. Captain Russell quoted a case.in point which illustrates the -,v.,d-ing of the Act as administered by the '(•. or!. It is that of a widow with six chilnearly all now grown up, whose husdid good service to the Colony in the Mao'l wars. He was a farmer with'limited iic.ai ; , who succeeded by sheer hard work in acquiring a moderate tract of land. On Ids death the family inherited a property of between seven and eight thousand acres. They were now, Captain Russell stated, all turned off by the Government, because it was held desirable in the public interests that they shonld be evicted and the land divided amongst other people. Not very

far from this property is the Hatnma Estate, lately taken by the Minister, and on that, says Captain Bussell, we find Government subdivisions of 1,217, 1,134, 1,609, 1,168, 878, 782, and 774 acre blocks. “This is facetiously called close settlement. “Now the total area of these seven blocks “is 7,452 acres, if anything of slightly “ superior quality to the land owned by the “widow lady and family of whom I am “ speaking. If those 7,452 acres were “divided into seven equal blocks, it gives “ to each an area of about 1,064 acres, being “ an area which practically is exactly what “the widow and her children would each “have retained if allowed to divide their “own property among themselves, instead “of the Minister dividing it among “strangers. Now, possibly,” continued the honorable gentleman, "that property will “be divided into larger areas, and those “ persons who have made the property, were “ boro and have spent their lives upon it, “ will be turned out -so that it may be “ divided amongst other people who have “never seen it.” •