CROWN PROPERTY RATES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21280, 6 September 1932, Page 8

CROWN PROPERTY RATES

In disclaiming responsibility for rates oh property mortgaged to the Crown, the Government is throwing upon local communities a very unjust burden. Yesterday the Prime Minister was informed that the Henderson Town Board was unable to collect rates on no fewer than 50 properties. There are many other districts where the relative position is just as bad. In One Tree Hill default on Crown properties amounts to a sum equivalent to a rate upon the rest of the owners of Hd in the pound. Mr. Forbes fails to appreciate tho loonl problem created by the Government's policy of deliberate default. Sheltering behind the fiction that its colossal lending was a noncompetitive activity upon which no margin of profit could be calculated, it undermines the financial stability of many local authorities, and sets the worst possible example to the section of the community that is always on the alert for a chance to avoid its civic .responsibilities. The plain truth of the matter is that State lending was encouraged by all political parties largely for political ends. There was much of the slipshod about the system. The deposit required from the borrower was much too small to maintain a margin even at the first breath of the depression, and there has been wholesale default to the State. But is that a justification for the highhanded action of refusing to pay rates, or, as happened in Mount B-oskill, of instructing a Crown mortgagee that he must pay all arrears of interest before arrears of rates'! The Government entered the lending market as a strong competitor of private landlords and the local authorities rightly demand that it should adhere to the ordinary tenets of commercial integrity.