THE PREMIER AT DONEDIN.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1412, 31 October 1885, Page 2

THE PREMIER AT DONEDIN.

(Continued) As closely bemngon the land question, let me tell you that THE NAXITE QUESTION cime before Parliament last session. You *ill have seen the telegrams iu the papera, and if you did not know I ho ways of telegrams yon must have thought there was going to be a big war o« the Went Coast right off. People were to be armed. Mr Balance's policy was called the "onepoliceman" policy, and it was sneered at. Why, he had actually ventured to take the Armed Constabulary away, and now they had been "taken away there would be tr>uh!e. Mtjor Atkinson said T« Whiti had prbpliesie.d they would bo taken away, and now they bad been taken a*jy he would regiM his prophecy as fulfilled, and 'here would be an uproar and trouble. Gentlemen, the armed constabulary were kept awn}', notwithstanding all that wn said by our po'itical opponents—the onepolicemun policy was maintained, and we have h>d peaee. We have not hud any disturbance J but mora than that, we hare had Natives come to see that wo are treating them rightponsly and as wen, and they have come to love us. We have had this—and it is something which could not be B>iid before : We have had Te Whiti's son come into our Courts, acknowledge their authority, and seek j iwtica there. Such a thing has not been he>ird of before. When Te Whiti *a.s seized lie would not allow even an application for a writ of habefi corpus to be made on his account. He would not acknowledge our Courts, and I say that when an impartial historian comes to write our h'Btory he will say that the exceptional legislation passed regarding the natives wai not audi b 8 any Immune people should have passed, and that it will remain a blot on our Statute-book. We kept to the one-policeman policy, and said we must treat the Maoris as human beings ; if they keep the peace we have no right to keep armed men before them. I have before »• *a «ftr|ot

which was published in one of the Taranaki papers on the effect of this onepoliceman policy, as it w« termed. [The Premier here read an extract from the Taranaki Herald, in which the success of Ihe Native policy of the Government was fully acknowledged.] There was our onepolicraan policy vindicated, and yon will oee from the papers bow the Native Minister has been met on the West Coast. The effect of that policy will be seen when I tell yon that notwithstanding our defence scare, notwithstanding the permanent array that some of my friends sire 10 very much frightened about—the 25 artillerymen coming here to make us an armed despotism nolwisbstanding all that, we have been able to reduce the armed constabulary from 650 to 400 men, and I hops we shall be able to Btill further reduce them. Then I would ask you to think of the attitude of the Maoris now compared with what it was before. I do not say that every Maori is well affected towards the Europeans—you cannot expect a change like that at once j but I say this, that tribes and hapus that were disanniented, and that would not look upon is with a friendly eye, are favorably digposed towards Europeans, and all desire that justice should be done. And now 1 come to one of the most important things brought before Parliament this nession, Bnd which, unfortunately, we were not able to pass—the Native Lands Disposition Bill. 1 will tell you why we were not able to pass it. We were not able to pass the Native Lands Disposition Bill because the people of the South Island have not taken time to consider what the Native land question means, and the consequence is that they Bend up representatives from all parts of this Island who will not aid the liberal settlement of this Native land question, but whose votes are •ontinnally going to aid the Native land sharks who live in the North Island. Juat think what this means: the Natives held about 20,000,000 acres of land in the North Island, and I Bay it is your duty, as you value the future of this Colony, to Bee that these millions of acres are properly settled, and that they shall not pass into the hands of a few men. How did we propose to deal with it) We introduced two bills—the Native Lands, Disposition, and the Native Land Laws Consolidation Bill. The Native Land Laws Consolidation Bill every landshark &aid was a Bplendid, and that it ought to pass. If the law was consolidated it would, of course, give greater facilities for the disposal of land, but we said No, we want the Native Lands Disposition Bill passed. I have here, but shall not have time to refer to it, the Native Lands Disposition Bill Mr Bryce has introduced, because this has been a question that Ministry after Ministry have tried to get solved, but have failed to get it settled. Well, what were the principle* of our bill 1 The principles of our bill were these. Say we hive a tribe owning half a million acres of land. First of all you have to settle who are the owners, and you, who are old colonistp, will remember that some of our most wicked and most bloody wars in the North Ishnd have been caused through this question of disputed title. What was the Waitara trouble ? Why, W 9 bought land off men who were not the owners of the land, and insisted upon keeping what was not ours because we had bought it off the wrong men, and it ended in a bloody war. The first thing, therefore, that you have to do is to ascertain judicially and properly who is the own*r of the land—to what tribe or hapn it belongs. Well, suppose you do that, what happens! This, perhaps, that a hundred men are entitled to this block of land, and they are entitled to have all their naraeß inserted in what is called the Crown grant, and that has to be done if ihe Natives want to sell their land. Unfortunately, many of the Nutives have not acquired habits of thrift, and the land is the only thing they have to Bell. No poor man can get an acre of Native land, no small settler ever got an acre of Native land, but I will tell you what happens. Suppose you are a speculator, and you want to buy 20, 30, or 50 thousand acres of Native land, what would you do ? Perhaps before the land was before the Court, before the title was ascertained at all, you would send Native agents and interpreters, and they would ge and buy one man's interest for £lO and some rum, and another man's for a small sum and some more rum, brandy, or whisky, and so it would go on until they get perhaps the hundred people to sign, and then you will employ agents to get the land through the Court, and secure the block. In the past history of the North Island 1 can assure you no small settler has been able to buy Native lands, but the landß have been bought by big rings and by speculators, who have been employing perhaps not oyer-scrupulus agents to get the land. We wished to stop that. And how did we propose to etop it 1 First the title was to be ascertained. Then, say there was a hundred men owning the land, these hundred men were to appoint a Committee that would act for the lot. Of course it would be easier to deal with a small committee than with a hundred men, but if this small Committee wanted to sell or lease tbey were not to go to the big speculators ] but to sell their land under the Waste Lands Actand through* Government Comm'Bsioner, so that the whole public of New Zealand will be on an and that it shall not go to the land-sharks. Gentlemen, if we hud been supported as we ought to have been by those who wish to Bee the North Island properly "settled, we would have been able perhaps to have passed the Bill. But those who had been in the habit of buying Native lands for lOd, a shilling, and half-a-crown an acre—rarely exceeding 5a an acre — were up in arms against our Bill. It was a terrible Bill, a land-sharking bill they called it, though it was a very peculiar thing that all land-sharks were agamst it. The South Island members did not nupport us in if. If the members from Otago, from Canterbury, and Nelson, .bad stood by us >n reference to this, and if the constituents of the South Island jtrere only alive to the importance of this question, they would have helped us to pass the Native Lands Disposition Bill, and we should not have the disgrace happen in New Zealand that haa happened before now, when eome of the finest land in the Colony has gone into the hands of speculator?, and Native* have been debauched and made drunken. The Native Land Bill went to a committee ; we were not able to pass it, but we intend to try to pass it. —(Applause.) Now let me say .to you another thing. We had surveyed lands before proceeding with the cod- ' structioo of the North Island railway, and

have reserved 4,000,C00 acres of l»n-a" and said that no person should be allowed to buy an acre there. The Government might buy but no person was to be allowed to buy an acre of that land, and no person shall—(Applause.) But we went further, and I will tell you what happened. In the past large reserves have been set apart in the North Island by the Government and by the Native Land Courts ; and generally these reserves have been set apart in this way : That the natives were not allowed to sell them and not allowed to mortgage them, and not allowed to lease them beyond 21 years without the consent of the Governor. This is what is called keeping the land under restriction. Well, what has happened in the past! Men have gone to work and made scoret bargain* with the Maon'B, and after buving up land, many times for a mere trifle, th»-y have gone to the Government and said ; " Lift I these restrictions and give mo the land"; and the Government have done it. Since we came into office not a single restriction has been lifted, except whore it had been promised before. After coming into office we determined to deal with this question, and, as I have said, we have endeavored to deal with it for the benefit of the State, and not for the benefit of Native land speculators. When you come to read the list of men who have got land from the Natives in the pas>t you will not wonder that the majority of the North Island men were against us, and especially againbt Mr BalUuce fer his mode of dealing with the Native lands. I wish to say something further about the Protection interests. 1 shall now speak of the PUBLIC WORKS POLICY. Gentlemen, I only wish, in dealing with this public works question, there was more understanding as to what it mean?, and as to what has been done in the past. We have heard it stated that taxation has greatly increased under the public works policy. No doubt it has. There are many in this room who know that when the public works policy was first proceeded with I thought it was proceeded with in a wrong form. I think so still. 1 think it was not set about with that due precaution that should have hedged round a large policy of that character. And what has been the result ? We have spent on public works of loan moneys, since 1870, £21,800,334 7s 6d ; and how, think you, we have spent it' Why, moat of the money should have gone to railways, it ought to have gone to something reproductive—to what would have helped to pay the interest we have to pay on loan moneys. If it had gone to railways, nobody need have objected. Let us look at this altogether outside tho money point of view ; lot us look at this from the moral point of view. I do not think it is our duty to go on borrowing money if we do not either provide a sinking fund or else;leave behind us what will give interest to those who come after us for the loans we have borrowed. I should like to point out as a public man that as colonists we should not think that the duty rests merely upon politicians. Every individual elector ought to think that he stands in the position of trustee to those wi o come after him, and that he ought not to leave this Colony in a worse position than he found it. Now how have we spent these loan moneys ? We have only spent on railways, out of £21,000.000, £11,000,000. That ib all we have spent on railways. We have spent £2,000,000 on immigration, £2,250,000 on roads, £1,500,000 on public buildings, charges and expenses, £168,000, and so on. It may not be uninteresting to you to know what Ministers have had the expending of these loan moneys. What was known as the Continuous Ministry, from 1870 to 1877, spent £11,000,000 of the £21,000,000. The Grey Ministry for little more than two years of office, spent £3,000,000 ; the Atkinson Ministry, for not five years of office, spent £7,000,000; while we for our seven months of office, spent £655,000; and yet some people have said we have been extravagant as compared with previous Ministries. When we came into office in 1884 the rate of expenditure of the public works loan money was nearly £1.600,000. While we spent, as T have told you, for our seven months, £655,000, the Atkinson Government for five months of the year 1884-85 spent £781,217, so that practically they spent for five months £130,000 more than we spent in seven months. I could give you year by year the expenditure, but perhaps it is unnecessary. The expenditure for the year was £1,409,588, whilst the total expenditure for our first year of office was £1,336,000, and we proposed still further to limit the public works expenditure to one million and a quarter. These are figures that cannot be disputed, and those who talk of extravagant expenditure should keep tbem in mind wheh they are making such assertion?. I will now tell you how proposed to deal with this question of public works expenditure. We proposed to ourselves to speedily make the connecting links of lines, so that the railways might at once turn us in some interest on our expenditure. That was our reason for pushing on the Otago Central. We wished to push od also the railway joining Napier, Woodville and Palmerston ; also some expenditure on the Main Trunk line and various other railways to which I ne6d not refer. Now I must tell you how it was that upwards of half a million was struck off the Public Works Estimates, what it means, and how it was brought about. I think I have made it plain to you that -instead of increasing the public works expenditure, we were, without causing any commotion throughout the Colony, carefully husbanding the resources of the Colony by reducing the expenditure in the way I have told you. (To be continued.)