LAND GAMBLING

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 8681, 14 March 1914, Page 6

LAND GAMBLING

To the Editor “ N.Z. Times.” Sir, —The ballot for Tara and Lansdown, at Waimate, where 168 applicants applied for seventeen sections, is, no doubt, as Mr Massey would say, a “ healthy sign of the times.” True, 161 would-be settlers (many no doubt with families) have gone away disappointed, but what does that matter, so long as land values are kept up, and “ John Bull ” is kept smiling? Where would we get the next loan from if we couldn’t show “an unprecedented rise in land values ” ? At Blenheim Mr Massey asserted the “Reform” party had “out-Heroded Herod” in their efforts at settling the land difficulty. “ Two thousand settlers placed on the land in twelve months.” Quite so! But from what class? Entirely the well-to-do. 1 glanced over the Hillersden sections, near Blenheim, lately settled, much to Mr Massey’s satisfaction (vide speech). The half-yearly rent, payable in advance, on one of- these sections was £291. Add fencing, house, woolshed, yards, stock, implements, etc., and you would want £SOOO to do any good. Take tho Martinborough settlement again. Here the bona fide working man has at last got his “square deal.” But what land! Why, tho Wainui-o-mata hills are fertile in comparison! Tho “happy” owners must go out to work to pay the rent on this class of land. Being at Akaroa lately I had an opportunity of seeing the working of the land system. The hills are in many places steeper than the Kaka, and the soil is poor. Yet here cocksfoot grows as nowhere else. So the owner gets as usual the full advantage, minus the usual have living to the working farmer. These bare, wind swept, stoop, rugged, sun-humt cliffs sell at anything up to £4O per acre! Up the West Coast on this island you will find small dairy farms of even second-class land selling up to £45 per acre. lias the man who has bought at this price any possible chanco of paying off the huge mortgage which invariably attaches to these farms, and represents not improvements but merely _ community created values, even if he sweats the existence out of his wife and family to do so? Not the slightest. He is simply “holding on,” doing little or nothing to improve tho place, with his eye round the corner for the land agent’s trap, bringing with him “a bigger fool than himself,” so as to make a few pounds on the deal. I ask you, sir, when you consider the effect this sort of thing—this gambling in land values, in what is essential to our very, existence —has upon the community; how it forces the people into the cities there to compete one with another for a bare existence in offices and shops; how it fences off the community from enjoying what the Almighty has created for the satisfaction of its needs, except upon such terms as to the majority make a country existence one of hopeless drudgery; and all that a mere handful of people may become wealthy at others’ expense, I say when you reflect on these things it makes one wonder at the stupidity of a people which has the franchise and the means of altering such conditions, and yet patiently submits ! At all events while these conditions obtain, while gambling in vital essentials is the rule, we might desist from the farce of pulpit denunciations of betting and racing, or prosecuting the poor Chinaman for the comparatively harmless vice of a tendency to pak-a-poo.—l am, etc..