ONE IN SIXTEEN

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8365, 27 February 1913, Page 6

ONE IN SIXTEEN

At a land ballot held last Saturday aft Taumaruuui there was another illustration of the enormous and rapidly growing difference between the demand for land and the supply available to meet that demand. Twenty-three sections found 365 would-be occupiers. That is to say, there was in' round terms one piece of land to every sixteen applicants. For every s person who was fortunate enough to draw a marble giving the. wonderful advantages of access to the soil, fifteen were sent away hungry and disappointed. In the meantime, while this deplorable scarcity of land for settlement goes on, while these glaring evidences of monopoly are displayed, emphasised, and advertised, "the Government is busy in helping the-specu-lator and the accumulator. Under the bogus pretence of providing “security of tenure,” the self-styled Reformers are bidding for votes with the national ea. tate, changing leasehold into freehold, and turning the whole country into a boodlers’ hunting-ground. Nothing is; being attempted to find land for the people. With the steady disappearance of the remnant of Crown lands, the situation grows steadily worse and the problem more acute, and the more this goes on the more do members of the Government ignore their responsibilities. One section to every sixteen persons desirous of becoming settlers is a pathetic circumstance. It is aggravated by the important fact that a squatters’ Government is on the Treasury benches. Nor is tho situation likely to ho improved by the expenditure of public money in relieving the Government’s friends, at high prices, of their estates. What we want is a graduated laud tax sufficiently heavy to compel the monopolist to make the fullest and most profitable use of his land or else to cut it up and sell it for closer settlement.