THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, May 20, 1938. SECURITY OF TENURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23505, 20 May 1938, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, May 20, 1938. SECURITY OF TENURE

In the address which he delivered on Monday evening Mr Nash, by way of answer to suggestions that the Government contemplated the abolition of the freehold tenure, made the statement that the farmer was entitled to full and undisturbed possession of his own land. The Government had not contemplated or discussed at any time, he said, any proposal to interfere with the freehold title of the farmer. Many people must wonder how an assurance of this kind is to be reconciled with the avowed Socialistic aims of the Labour Party. The fact is, of course, that Labour speaks with more than one voice. Where one Minister blows hot another may find it expedient to blow cold. On the question of land policy, which is one of vital importance to the country, the Government has deemed it discreet to say very little thus far. It would be to the farmer as his sheetanchor. Mr Savage saw fit a few weeks ago to declare that it was not the Government’s intention to socialise the farms. Likewise, to allay apprehension. Mr Nash now says the farmer is entitled to the full and undisturbed possession of his own land. But, unfortunately for Ministerial consistency and public conviction, sandwiched in between these assurances was the statement made by the Minister of Lands to the Labour Party Conference last month in which he bluntly declared that the failure of land settlement in the past had been due to the granting of titles. Every man who worked on the land, said Mr Langstone, wanted a title to a piece of it: the man who worked in a factory did not demand a title to the factory nor did the railway man expect eventually to own a piece of railway, yet the land-worker wanted a title to the land. “ What does he want it for?” asked the Minister. He answered the question to his own satisfaction by saying that “ past history has shown that he wants it to gamble with—to get away with plunder.” The indictment is not flattering to the primary producer. The plain inference to be drawn from Mr Langstone’s utterance — albeit curiously enough in an earlier passage he had referred to the “splendidly efficient farmers” of New Zealand—must be that thd* freehold tenure from the Government’s point of view is an evil that has been permitted to survive too long, and that the ideal farm is to be developed through State ownership of the land. If the Minister of Lands is an authority on the subject the Socialist Party has no thought of deviation from its old gospel in the matter of land policy, and he has, moreover, explicitly declared that in the case of all farms under what he has called the new type of State development the land must remain in State ownership. Against Mr Nash’s declaration that, the farmer is entitled to full and undisturbed possession of his land it is instructive again to place the view expressed in print by Mr C. M. Williams, M.P.~who should know

the Ministerial mind—which was recalled to useful purpose by Mr Bodkin in his address at Balclutha this week. Mr Williams sees the small farmer doomed to extinction and the salvation of his industry resting in collective farming. It v/ould be very interesting to know whether the mingled commiseration and contempt expressed by him for “ little capitalists in a capitalistic world ” is shared at heart by all members of the Socialist Party, despite Mr Nash’s assurance respecting the Government’s attitude towards the freehold tenure, and despite the extent to which the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance may appear to have committed themselves, in their soothing utterances to farmers, to definite repudiation of any intention on the Government’s part to develop a Socialistic land policy.