GREAT LAND SALE IN OTAGO.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 40, 28 October 1871, Page 15

GREAT LAND SALE IN OTAGO.

The “ Otago Daily Times” begins a leader of the I7fch with the following :—“ No political event that has occurred in Otago for many years past has, we believe, caused moreastonishment than the recent sale of 50,000 acres of land to Mr Clarke. The transaction itself is so exceptional and surprising that it must necessarily have been a nine days wonder, whoever the particular individuals for the time being in power might have been. Astonishment is doubled by the fact that it is Mr Reid and his party who have been the active instruments in thus —to use their own phraseology— * allowing the patrimony of the people to pass into the rapacious hands of the squatter.’ These are the men who, for the past two years, have been denouncing the Hundreds Regulation Acts, on the ground that they made it difficult to get the ‘people’s pataimony’ out of those ‘ rapacious hands.’ Their great point has been that the agricultural settler is the only man who should be cared for and protected by our Land Laws. With this os a basis for their arguments, they have been endeavoring to prove the iniquity of the recent changes in the law. As the land sales fell off, and the Treasury,'as a natural consequences, became empty, they have tried to make us believe that it was not their obstinate maladministration of the law, but the law itself, that was to blame for this stoppage of settlement, and the absence of funds with which to prosecute much needed public works. By the course they have thought fit to pursue they have run the province heavily into debt, and now, rather than use the facilities which the law has provided for them, and bring land into the market which their pet agricultural settlers could and would purchase, they try to flounder out of their diffiulties by making this extraordinary sale to a runholdcr—a sale, we venture to say, which no set of men holding office before them would have dared to make

To render the peculiarity and impropriety of this sale complete, one of those tricks which only the “ people’s friends” know how to play was made use of to prevent any slips between “ cup and lip” in concluding the transaction. The Deputy-Superintendent was out of town, and the Chief Commissioner of the Waste Land Board was at sea, on his way back from Wellington. Both would have been at their posts on the Wednesday, the usual day for Waste Land Board meetings, A special meeting was held on the Tuesday, whether legally or not we really do not know, for the purpose of settling this transaction. By law the meetings of the board are open to the public, and the press habitually reports the proceedings. All knowledge of what occurred at this specially interesting meeting was carefully withheld from the press, and, we need hardly add, “ the public” was entirely unrepresented on the occasion.