ABANDONED FARMS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20191, 31 August 1927, Page 5

ABANDONED FARMS.

A MUCH-DISCUSSED SPEECH. TEXT OF OFFENDING EXTENT. (From Our Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, August 30. Further information concerning the speech delivered by Mr W. Pember Reeves (chairman) at the annual meeting of the National Bank of New Zealand, held in London on July 6 last, was placed Vforc the House of Representatives to-day. The Prime Minister, in reply to a question, quoted from an extended report of the relevant part of the speech ns follows: — “I do not propose,” ran the extract from Mr Reeves’s speech, “to go into the cause of the agricultural depression in New Zealand. Such a thing is certainly a- paradox in a country so blessed by Nature, and where the farmers ->r a quarter of a century have possessed and -.scd a dominating political influence. T tell you the story would lead me to give a summary of the economic and to some extent political history of the Dominion for a great many years. I will • t take up your time by going into '* causes which hoisted up the price of land to insane figures and induced hundreds of sanguine purchasers to buy more land than they should and mortgage themselves p to the eyes in the process. I will content myself with pointing out that the cruel but necessary process of deflating land values has not, in my opinion, to go much further, and that the weaker landholders are being weeded out pretty thoroi My. During the last six years the total number of bankrupt farmers has been between 700 and 800 —that is, about four times as large as the number durir '•he six years before 1021. These hundreds, however, are nothing .to the number of men who, without becoming legally bankrupt have walked off their farms, leaving thcr property to their* mortgagees. To this must be added a considerable number -* men who, while able to carry on, are too heavily indebted to employ the labour for effecting the improvements that their properties require. Assuredly no class in the country is more deserving of sympathy and assistance at the moment, and I ugrec with a recent speech of the Minister of Lands in which he stated that one of the many tasks of the Government wouM be to save, if it could, that class of the men on the land,”