LAND SETTLEMENT

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7372, 25 January 1902, Page 2

LAND SETTLEMENT

In a recent epaech, a Government supporter in Parliament commented on the curious contradictory action of tbe Government in selling thousands of acres in certain districts of the colony, and in others repurchasing lands at enormous cost, and asked if inconsistency could further go ? His remedy was to stop the sales for cash, and make the leasehold the one tenure. On' that we would only express the belief that while limitation of the area to be held by any one man is an end to be desired, it is not unlikely that any attempt to force the leasehold would lead to a decrease of settlement, by making New Zealand still less able to compete with other countries in respect* of attracting settlers of a good stamp. Such doctrinaire ideas as universal and compulsory State landlordism would be all very well if you could enforce them the world over or compal people to come to New Zealand and accept them, but the Lands Department statistics of the last few years show how general is the preference for occupancy on terms which give the farmer a chance to make his farm freehold, and suggest that if people could not get freehold farms in New Zealand those who could would go where they could get them. But the charge of inconsistency referred to is a reminder of the still greater anomaly that the energies of the Government are so absorbed in the' resumption and closer settlement of private lands, with varying success, that it has

become lax in that most impqrtant branoh of work the settlement of Crown lands now lying idle. The Auckland papers especially ere oomplaining about the torpidity of the Lands Department in regard to the Kawhia land, and we know that young men of Taranaki have been on the lookout for an opportunity of making homes for themselves on the land. Similar complaints are made in other parts of the North Island, [f tho complaints are well founded, and they appear to be, it is no wonder that young men are found in such numbers ready to volunteer for serv.ee in South Africa. The lands which the Governments are acquiriog under the Lands for Settlements Act are very often too expensive for poor men to tackle, and the cheaper land on which people could make a start, and the subjection of which would broaden the basis of the colony's produce export, is left lying idle, presumably because so much cash is needed to keep going at high pressure the vote-securing policy of the Lands for Settlements Act. That policy is in itself and within limits excellent, but it should be subsidiary to the greater policy of settling what are commonly known as the waste lands of the Crown.