Land-Stealing in Hawke's Bay

Observer, Volume X, Issue 604, 31 January 1891, Page 3

Land-Stealing in Hawke's Bay

The Hawke's Bay Herald, replying to a recent paragraph, calls the O.M. a ' liar,' and says it is * not aware of a single acre of land being illegally occupied in Hawke's Bay.' It further adds that ' there are plenty of lawyers who would readily take up such a case if it existed in fact.' Ift ar the ignorance of the Herald on this subject is more assumed than real. The wholesale illegal occupation of land referred to by me needs no further proof than the fact that repeated attempts have been made by land-grabbers and their political tools to get Parliament to paBS special measures to give valid titles to the occupiers of land illegally acquired from the natives. In Hawke's Bay alone there were nearly a million acres of land obtained by the pretended owners in open violation of the law, and they are exactly in the same position with regard to it as Desmond was with respect to the Auckland office, about which so much fuss was made by the Herald.

As for the Herald's theory that if land is illegally occupied there are plenty of lawyers to take up such oaßes, it is sufficient answer to say that the New Zealand Government, representing the people, is the victimised party, and as the Government and the land thieves have hitherto been hand and glove, nothing could be done to cure the evil. When a Democratic Government is once firmly established, lawyers may be employed to get the land back again for the people ; but probably a force of Mounted Constabulary would be found more efficacious in chasing the land-grabbers off their Ormondised estates.

The Herald denies that any of its registered owners are implicated in native land transactions. It is well known, however, in Napier, that the real proprietors of the Herald are not registered as such, and some^ of these are certainly deeply interested in a large portion of the million acres unlawfully acquired and occupied by certain people in Hawke's Bay. From which it follows that the Herald, while loudly proclaiming the iniquity of the man who illegally occupied a paltry old office in Auckland, is conveniently deaf, dumb and blind to the collossal rascaldom of the illegal occupiers of nearly a million acres of the people's land, in its own vicinity. Now, who is the liar ?