REFORMERS AND LAND TAX

Hokitika Guardian, 3 October 1929, Page 7

REFORMERS AND LAND TAX

(Auckland Star.) ; The members of the Reform Party arc certainly doing their best to produce an unfavourable impression of the Land Tax Bill. ' Mr Campbell told the House on Thursday that the Gill would have a disastrous effect on land values, that it would not harm the rich man, hut would hurt the small farmer, and that it would swell the army of unemployed. Mr Waite said the Bill would “drive catribal out of the country.” Mr Macmillan warned his hearers that “our credit on the London money market would suffer.” Mr Jones asked the House to contemplate the harrowing spectacle of ‘huge areas of slicejilauds’’ thrown upon a falling market, with no buyers forthcoming.

All this has a curiously familiar Lone, and'as a matter of fact Conservative politicians and journalists and landowners said precisely these things in denunciation of the luml taxes and land for settlement, measures of the Sodden era. let, as we all know, the landowners were not ruined, the. land market was not swamped, capital was not driven from the country, and our credit at Home did not suffer.

Mr Coates, after making a pathetic appeal on .behalf of the struggling small farmer who is doomed to ruin by the new supertax which he will ‘ n'eve.r have'to pay, solemnly warned the House that trade is already falling off and that “unemployment is already affected by the proposals in the Bill.” People who can believe that wij believe anything. We are not sure that we do not prefer the whole-hearted vituperation with which Air D. Jones has relieved bis,, soul. Already be lias promised the Prime Minister a glorious immortality if the Bill goes through—“the names of Wal'd, lamin and Trotsky” are to be associated together for all time as the champion robbers and despoilers of history. H the House had any true sense of the dramatic, 'the debnt.o should 'have slopped then and there; for anything LhaL came after Air Jones’ etiort must he pn ianli-i Umax. And the Bill passed its second reading all the same.