RATING SYSTEMS

Evening Star, Issue 21821, 10 September 1934, Page 13

RATING SYSTEMS

MR O'REGAN'S FINAL ADDRESS TLe Coronation Hall, Maori Hill, was well occupied on Saturday night to hear an address by Mr P. J. O’Regan on rating systems. Mr C. Hunt presided. Mr O’Regan said that every political truth was a moral truth, and the paramount consideration should ever be justice. “ No man,” Ruskin had written, “ can tell the result of a given line of action, but all men may know, and most men do know, what is a just or unjust action, and all men may know also that the consequences of justice will always be the best possible.” Now, there was no truth, continued Mr O’Regan, that had been longer or more universally recognised than that land was by natural right the birthright of all the people. The Jews of old under the Mosaic Code had their year of jubilee, when land was redistributed. The law was not applicable to land in a walled city, but even there the man who sold his section had an entire year within which he could withdraw from

his bargain, and hence there could never be what we called a land boom.

Mr O’Regan said that a parliamentary paper laid on the table of the House or Representatives last week with 'reference to Samoa had stated, inter alia, that there was no poverty among the Samoans for the reason that they all possessed land. Again, in the Tongan or .Friendly Islands of 385 square miles there were 27,000 people, of whom not more than 500 were whites, and there also poverty and unemployment were unknown. The reason was that everv male Tongan on attaining the age of sixteen years paid a yearly tax of 30s for the remainder of his life, and in return he received an .indefeasible right to occupy 8J acres of land, as well as three-quarters of an acre for a building sitp in his - native village; hence, there was no housing problem in Tonga, no unemployed, and they balanced their Budget and had a surplus ! The collection of the community value of land harmonised perfectly with the great moral law of justice, said the speaker, first, because it took for indispensable social needs part of the ground which morally belonged to all, and, secondly, because it left to each member of the community all that was right-

fully his —namely, the product of his own industry; hence the taxation of the unimproved value of land conformed perfectly with the right of private property. Mr O’Regan declared himself an individualist. He had no sympathy whatever with schemes of State or municipal housing, and he denied that private enterprise had failed to solve the housing problem. “ The proper man to build a house,” declared the speaker, “ is the man who is going to live in it —(‘ Hear, hear ’) —and private enterprise had not, and could not, obtain a fair field until land was made cheap and accessible to labour. To concentrate taxation on the unimproved (or community) value of land meant that the springs of industry would be set in motion. Capital, now frozen, as it were, because it was utilised in withholding land from use, would necessarily be released, and would engage in production, for the only proper function .of capital was_ to co-operate with labour in the production of wealth. Accordingly, the more they considered the question in issue the more they would realise that a great principle was also involved in the question upon which the ratepayers of Dunedin were to vote on Tuesday.