THE STATE AND LOCAL RATES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20981, 18 September 1931, Page 8

THE STATE AND LOCAL RATES.

Professions of sympathy with the difficulties of local authorities and with oppressed ratepayers would be more convincing if the Government would undertake to assist the former and relieve the latter by accepting its moral obligations as a landowner in rural districts and a speculative builder in the towns. From all parts r>f the Dominion evidence is accumulating of the injury to local administration that is being caused by the Government's abuse of the statutory exemption of Crown property from local rates. Protests are being made on two grounds: on the one hand, the Government purchases private property and immediately stops the payment of rates upon it; on the other hand, when properties mortgaged to the State Advances and other departments revert to them, liability for arrears of rates is disclaimed and liability is accepted for only special and water rates. In the Budget, Mr. Forbes repeated his proposal of a Royal Commission to investigate all local administration, declaring that "one of the most onerous items in the overhead costs of farming is rates" ; yet he does not hesitate to aggravate the burden by forcing local authorities to collect from private ratepayers the share of taxation that should be contributed by properties in the possession of Government departments. The only excuse for this policy is expediency: that it would be difficult for the Government, out of its strait-

ened finances, to pay rates on acquired properties and that the liability would be embarrassing to a department that has engaged in the financing of house-building on a huge scale -without proper provision for the risks of such undertakings. The assumption that the Government can assert and maintain privileges of this character is, however, entirely fallacious. An English authority has observed that in their relations with local government institutions, Parliaments assume a moral superiority which has no justification. Both Parliament and local authorities are elected bodies, established to serve national and local interests respectively, and there is no ground for the pretension of Government or Parliament that intervention in local matters can be .made without regard to local interests. In this matter of local rating, the Government is really demanding from private ratepayers an indefinite subsidy upon State land development and State-aided housing, and enforcing the payment of subsidies in an indiscriminate fashion. The demand of local authorities for redress is incontestable and they should continue their representations insistently until the Government is persuaded to acknowledge that its attitude is indefensible.