The Grey River Argus Wednesday, November9, 1949. NATIONALISTS TRY TO FALSIFY HISTORY

Grey River Argus, 9 November 1949, Page 4

The Grey River Argus Wednesday, November9, 1949. NATIONALISTS TRY TO FALSIFY HISTORY

’ or wrong, the National Party make sure all say the same thing on the platform or in the press at the same time. At the 1 moment the illustration is the slump. They claim iheir Party handled it perfectly, which is rather an impudent thing to tell the country when it dumped them out of office for the way in which they bungled the slump. In spite of that popular verdict, the effrontery with which the Nationv alists now ply their whitewash - brush is a fair criterion of the _ unreliability of all the rest of 1. their assurances to the electors. ‘ If slave camps and waste of 3 labour, the ditching of the Arbie 1 ration Court and of apprentices’ e rights; devaluation of currency, bankrupting of farmers, and an al] round go-slow policy, such as „ preceded Labour’s advent Io of- (> Hee, is still the .Nationalist idea, 1 then it would bo indeed a black 2 outlook if they gained office and a depression loomed up. Mr 110 - , land last night implied that exporters’ pools ought to -be held in cash, at call, in case of a slump, instead of having been invested so as to earn more. He quoted the fact of such investment to suggest that if the Government has a pay-out from the pools, it will amount only to inflation, but suggests that if private bankers were to be making the pay-out it r would not ! Yet the private bank- . pi's in the slump refused to come to light at all, and made the plight of the trailers, farmers and workers very much worst* than it ever need have been made. Mr Holland admits at least, that this Government would not close down upon credit when it would be most needed, although his own . Party is prone to furnish credit only when it is least needed. The Nationalist candidate here is a faithful echo just now for the Party on this slum]) issue, and his twist to the Party argument is quite as contrary to fact as his leader’s claim that the Tory regime handled the shim]) more successfully than any other Government at the time. .Mr O’Regan gives the electors no credit for emptying out the last Government. and at the same time denies to the present Government any credit for what it did to get rid of the slump. .His version is that ’ “the Labour Government was swept forward on a general tide of recovery”. Leaving aside what ’ the people may recollect of the guaranteed prices (so necessary ) in spite of that “tide”) and other policies of the new Government for “sweeping forward”, it may be remarked that, what their predecessors did to the contrary would block the effect of any tide of recovery. Moreover, its re--1 petition could not be risked with I a possibility of another slump of I the man-made variety. I Air ()’Regan is, however, tryI ing at least one variation of his own in the Party lune. He aceuses the Government of “taking timber from the leasehold”, and of “filching overnight” rights leaseholders held for forty years. Rights which he alleges to have been “absolute” to timber on land leased from the Grown, were, he says, taken in 1948 from lessees by Section 100 of the Land Act, and resumed bv the Crown. No proof whatever does he give that there were previously such “absolute” rights. The principle of previous legislation relating to timber on leased areas -was that the timber -would be available for farming and similar purposes, but not for the purposes of commercial sawmilling. Section 100 simply maintained that principle of good husbandry, stating that the lessee should not fell, si'll, or remove timber unless given the prior consent of the Crown Lands Commissioner. If, previously, some leaseholders contravened that principle, they did so illegally. There always has been a definite distinction between the timber rights of a freeholder and a leaseholder, 'but the Government has assured leaseholders that if they observe the rules of good husbandry, Hwy will obtain royalties .from timber on their holdings when the Commissioner approves of its disposal. The leaseholder can. use the timber as he likes without reference 1o the i Commissioner for al] hi.s farming, household, reading or building purposes on his holding. If some- ; ’body leases land with an eve to ]

making money from selling to sawmillers tin' timber content, what sort of farming is that? The law never contemplated at any time the tying up of timber for milling by tlje expedient of taking a farming lease of it—not to farm the land, but to farm the timber. The 1948 Act was a consolidating measure, which maintained the spirit of the 1924 and earlier laws, which naturally distinguished between farming leases and grants of timber areas for milling purposes.