UNIMPROVED RATING

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 270, 29 October 1932, Page 9

UNIMPROVED RATING

(To the Editor.) Sir.— It is passing strange that some landowners, oppressed with their burden of rates, should seek a way of escape by so-called unimproved value rating. The New Zealand disciples of the late Henry George formerly advocated the destruction of private property in land by the imposition of one tax for every governmental and local body service. They called themselves land nationalisers and their medium for confiscation, the single tax. They were the initiators and missionaries of unimproved rating as the best available weapon to remove taxes from other forms of wealth and load them on to land values, It is inconsistent to ask for rating relief for the transference of the growing charge of hospital administration from land workers to every class of income earners, and then to advocate the removal of that portion of the rates borne by improvements under the system of capital value rating on to the man whose style of farming requires more land.

Like one of your correspondents, Mr Fowlds, now Sir George, in advocating unimproved rating laid it down as a major premise that every man should pay in proportion to the benefits he received. My question to him is apposite to-day. I pointed out that in Rodney County, like Hawke’s Bay County, there are two principal farming operations, one the grazing of stock, which required the more extensive holding of land and requires only a minimum use of roads per acre held; the other the growing of fruit, which requires a minimum of land by reason of intensive culture, and a maximum ’ise of the roads per acre of land held, and asked him whether it was just that the grazier should be called upon to pay so much more for- the benefits he required in comparison to the fruitgrower 1 Mr Fowlds stroked his hair, and after a little hesitation, suggested that the grazier should go in for fruit growing! It is more than time that relief was given to land workers in urban rating areas by the repeal of the unjust hotch potch called unimproved rating. Fathered by city dreamers with the deliberate aim of loading the land with every burden, it is proved in operation unequal and unfair.—l am. etc. H. R. FRENCH Hastings, Oct 2*. 1932