STABILISED LAND VALUES.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLVI, Issue 2125, 17 May 1922, Page 4

STABILISED LAND VALUES.

The recent demand for revaluation of soldier settlement land, the constant appeals against Government valuations, and the huge and costly machinery employed in this form of permanent litigation, may be linked together as a gravely disturbing factor in the commercial side of the farmer's life. It disturbs the balance of his taxation, and causes an instability in his securities. It is a factor in the disaster of inflated as well as deflated values. It embarrasses the finance of the Government. These and other results combine, to condemn the *»ystem on the debit side. What do we find in the credit column? To us, at least, It is answered only by that note of interrogation. All this and more was probably in the mind of that far-seeing statesman, Kir John MoKenzie, when he brought in his famous Renewable Lease Bill, which obtained a blank reception from our politically expedient members of Parliament, lie did, however, ring in one deliberate, and subsequently professed, practical joke upon these men of density, whose cry was for permanence, but whose acts were for a pleading expedient. In this way he passed his famous "pleasantry" of 909 years' lease in perpetuity. Not a man in the House discovered the trick till the Biil had passed, and then he dared not acknowledge it. It is now, however, a factor in stabilising values, a feature which has not yet reached the freehold, or so-called freehold, with its permanent and generally cumulative burden of mortgages. There is not at this moment a John iJallance, John MeKenzie, or a Richard Seddon in the House, or one big enough to sweep away this whole complication of costly disturbance caused by valuation, revaluation, appeal and inflation, or to substitute for it the obviously sterling, standard, relative and permanent valuation of every acre of land in New Zealand. To stabilise land values in this little country of ours is just aj» important to us as it may be to Britain to standardise her gold currency.