Untitled

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19505, 13 June 1925, Page 10

LABOUR’S LAND POLICY. We publish this morning another contribution from the local self-appointed apologist for the land policy of the Labour Party. The discussion of this subject has, we think, been fairly entertaining, especially in the respect that it has revealed to the public how little some of the supporters of the Labour Party really know about its policy and how desperately they endeavour to evade an acknowledgment cf the necessary implications of that policy. We have now, however, dragged from Mr C. M. Moss an admission that “land, property, etc., cannot under the Labour Party’s policy be willed” as at present. The education of Mr Moss up to this point has been a somewhat slow process. He has been a reluctant pupil who has advanced by grudging steps to the stage of perception of his party’s platform which he has now reached. His original statement was that it was “really ridiculous” to say that the policy of his party interfered with the right of inheritance. He took as a hypothetical case the possession of a farm by a man who dies, “leaving a will, bequeathing all to his son.” This we quote from Mr Moss’s letter in our issue of June 5. When he next wrote to us he shifted his ground. Taking the same supposititious ease, he informed us in our issue of June 11 that the farmer, wishing to bequeath his ‘’interests”—not, it will be noted, his “all”—to his son, “leaves his will instructing the State to pass over to his son the value of his interest.” This suggestion of the functions which the State would assume was too ludicrous to bear a moment’s consideration, and Mr Moss now abandons it. “It is true,” he writes this morning, “that land, property, etc., cannot under the Labour Parly’s policy be willed” as at present. Forgetting the position ho took up in his letter of June 5, he

asserts that “no one disputes that.” “It is,” he adds, “quite clear.” That at least is satisfactory. It is “quite clear” to Mr Moss now that what we hare said all along as to the effect of the Labour Party’s policy upon the right of inheritance is indisputable. Very well. We invite him, then, to consider the case of a working man in his own suburb of North-East Valley who has, out of his savings, acquired a home for himself and his wife and family in the hope and -desire that, when he dies, they may enjoy the use of it. The owner of this home can under present conditions bequeath it to his wife. Under the Labour Party’s land policy he would, as Mr Moss admits, be prevented from doing this. Upon his death the property would have to be transferred to a soulless State, because the Labour Party lays it down in its programme that “privately-owned land shall not be sold or transferred except to the State.” Mr Moss will say that the State would not be so heartless as to turn the widow out. Perhaps it would not, but there is no certainty that it would allow her to remain in possession. At the very best, however, the widow would become merely a tenant of the property which her husband had acquired in order that he might provide a home for those who were dependent on him. His life s ambition, that of leaving his wife in the position that, no matter what happened, she would have a home of her own after his death would be defeated. That is what the Labour Party’s land policy means, and it is that policy over which Mr Moss is so enthusiastic that he has thought fit to declare that it will preserve for New Zealand the name of “God’s own country”!