THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1885.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7353, 13 June 1885, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1885.

The news which we have from Wellington in respect to the native measures of the Government is very startling. The Ministers have woke up to the fact that the proposals of Mr. Ballance in respect to native lands are absolutely mischievous, absurd, and unworkable. Mr. Ballance is displaying j most lamentable weakness on the subject. He pledged himself to have the i Bill circulated long enough, before Parliament met to give .natives and ! Europeans full opportunity of considering it. Nothing was known of it till a Week or two ago, when "Wellington correspondents obtained the chief features, we believe from Mr. Ballance himself. The Wellington Post, a journal which energetically supports the Government, published a full abstract of the Bill, occupying a column of small type, and also a leading article" on the subject. The writer of the leading article must have been inspired, while the man who did the abstract must have had the full text- of the Bill before him. The whole of the , Ministers now see' theT 7 Btige mistake that has been made. Mr. Ballance will now give no information about the. Bill whatever, and, it seems, wishes it to be inferred that his proposals have been wrongly stated by the newspapers. Our criticisms, it appears, have greatly contributed to the state of affairs revealed by our correspondent's telegram, and as these criticisms were written after full consideration of the details, we feel sure they will stand the test of close examination. As a matter of fact, we have not yet exhausted our examination' of the measure. We have several further damaging exposures to make. But, surely, this attempt of Mr. Ballance to get out of the responsibility of the abstract of, the Bill which was published, is, to say the least of it, disingenuous. If that was not the Bill which was published, where is the real Simon Pure ? And why has Mr. Ballance allowed us to waste our own and our readers' time by criticising a b»gus measure? Why has he allowed the Ministry to sustain damage by having such a measure imputedto them ? There is some danger, it is thought, that owing to the muddle, no native measures at all will be passed this session. They would require long and careful consideration, and that they can hardly now receive. It seems that, owing to the breakdown of the Ministry on this subject, it has been mooted that a committee should be appointed to draw up a Bill. This would be a curious position for the Ministry to accept. But even if they were willing to hand over the most important of their functions to a committee, and the House were willing to allow them to try this solution of the difficulty, the time is now too short. And yet the subject must be dealt with. The Government must make up their minds to that, and the Northern members must see * that it is done. Last session the Government declared that the time had fully come, before the commencement of the trunk railway. They were quite right, and if the Bill had been a good one, they should have gone on with it notwithstanding the resistance of Wahanui. But the colony cannot afford another postponement. The railway is now being constructed, and before another year complications innumerable will have grown up. In the Governor's Speech, Ministers said that "as land is provided for settlement along the line, the North Island will doubtless make great strides in permanent agricultural settlement." We do not know where the land can be which is "provided for settlement." There is none in this part of the island, at all events, and we suspect that the land is only provided in imagination. Unless a measure is passed during the present session, the Act of last year will stand, by which the country is locked up. , And locked up it would be against anything like settlement. But in the meantime companies and syndicates will get to work, and we venture to say that next year private interests will be so strong that it will be impossible to pass a just and fair measure by which the interior of the North Island can be settled. And all the time we are borrowing money to make a railway through the country which by law we are prohibiting from being settled. . .