GOVERNMENT ECONOMY

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4565, 5 November 1937, Page 2

GOVERNMENT ECONOMY

MR. BROADFOOT'S VIEWS. LANDS DEPARTMENT ACTIVITIES. TITLES TO THE LAND. The necessity for economy in Government expenditure was stressed by Mr. W. J. Broadfoot, M.P. for Waitomo when speaking on the Estimates in the House of Representatives.

Mr. Broadfoot said that the Government were trustees for the people, who were entitled to the best value possible. In almost every rural area departments of State would be found represented by one or two or three men who had to do an immense amount of travelling.. Take, for instance, he said, the Valuation Department, the State Advances Corporation, and the Lands Department. Valuation, perhaps, would be wanted in a particular area, and a representative of each department had to go into the same territory practically at the same time to make valuations, with the result that three times the amount of travelling necessary was done. With regard to the Lands Department, he felt that so far as land development was concerned, the point had been reached when the men who had developed many places should know when they were to get their titles, and what kind of title they could expect. A definite promise was made that they would get a lease with the right to freehold in due course, and he would like to know whether the Minister was going to keep that promise. If the policy was to be varied, he thought those concerned should be advised so that they would know what they had to face up to. The activities of the Lands Department had not been widened very much, and there seemed to be a tendency to scatter the activities a good deal. The activities should be more concentrated, so that the territory could be rounded off in a properly settled manner. The present method of taking over blocks of land all over the place made supervision extremely expensive, and that was the direction in which travelling expenses could, perhaps, be cut down considerably. There was a great opportunity for the co-ordination of Native and European development, where both types of land were contiguous, and the same supervisors could be used in develop-, ment work of that nature. In Waitomo the lands were contiguous, and they could be dealt with in that way. The cost of running the Land and Income Tax Department had gone up by £152,000, that of the Government Printing Department by £113,000, and that of the Labour Department by £237,000. He realised, of course, that ■

that was the Government's method of tackling the unemployment problem and finding new jobs for people; hut he did not think it was the right method. If the farming and secondary industries had been given freer play, he believed they would have absorbed the unemployed. The cost of Public Works maintenance had increased by over £2,000,000 in the past two years, and nobody could say that at such a time of prosperity all that money should have been spent on Public Works maintenance. It was accepted all over the world that major public works should be held over till times of difficulty arrive. About £120,000 was being spent on the main highway in his territory, while people in the backblocks still had no metal on their roads. He had been getting the roads done at the rate of about 80 miles a year, and last year was the worst" year he had had so far as mileage of metalling was concerned.