MASSEY AND HIS MASTERS

NZ Truth, Issue 873, 19 August 1922, Page 4

MASSEY AND HIS MASTERS

A SCANDALOUS SOMERSAULT,

When the committee of business men, appointed to consider taxation, decided to hold all .its proceedings behind, closed doors, anyone might haye bet that there was a little plan afoot to prepare a "let out" for somebody and a "let m" for somebody else. And so it has proved. The "let out" is for the big man, particularly the big man on the land. The "let m" is for the little man everywhere. In speaking to the Child Sustenance Bill, Colonel Mitchell explained that while even the Salvation Army, with its wholesale economies, cannot keep a child under 12s 6d a week, a five-children family employed by the Public Works Department is asked to exist on 5s 4d per week per head. The Government was deaf. But the Government heard m advance the "business" committee's cry to help the big landlord by lifting his supertax, and a large slice of it is already m legislative process of being taken off. The children m the five-and-four-pence per head house can go hang, but the author of the Square Deal will waddle to the rescue of the poor little rich children. The man with the pocket handkerchief back-yard, whose pay always lagged behind prices m the run-up (but not m the run-down), will pay for the tax that is lost by lifting the super-tax off broad acres. This lifting of land tax super- tax off big landholders (big m area or m value) is more than a gross inequity. It is also a piece of Governmental perjury. It reveals a stage v of hypocrisy to which one is loth to believe that even party politics would descend. Mr Massey himself affirmed that the purpose of the super-tax, m the 'higher grades, was to force subdivision of I land. He made that statement m the years when prices were good — so good that the super- taxation did not compel his friends the big landholders to sell. Now that times are no longer good, and there is a chance that the super-tax may achieve its. avowed purpose of forcing sales, Mr Massey rushes to reduce and remove it. He began last year by rebating it. He promises to cancel it entirely. The "business" committee comes to his aid by reporting on "the crushing effect" of taxation "upon large landowners." Very good. By what other .process can a super- tax force land sales? The "business" committee also talks about the tax being "paid out of capital." " But what ' is the use of a sale-compelling tax unless it does fall upon capital? That is exactly what it was meant to do, if Mr Massey was honest when he said that the purpose was to force subdivision. If ! The truth behind the sordid shuffle is that the Square Dealer's talk about forcing sales was camouflage and political window-dressing. His masters were .not then hurt by his stage thunder. Now that the slump has put a little lightning into it, it is being 'hurried back into the property box, as' quietly as possible, lest the woodenheaded voter should wake up. In all the blatant hypocrisy of the party politics of to-day, no transaction equals m impudence this imposition of an estate-breaking tax that is recalled as soon as It threatens to do some breaking. It is the sort of political swindle that breeds Bolshevism. The catch- cry that the country is run m the interests of capitalism is nine-tenths untrue, but what answer can be made to the demagogues when they point to this scandalous somersault m the Temple of Masseyism? ■ No sane politician would so humiliate himself if he could avoid it. And Mr Massey . is by no means an idiot. But there are reactionary factors on whose support he leans. The affair proves once again who Massey's, Masters are.