The Waikato Times.

Waikato Times, Volume XIII, Issue 1099, 10 July 1879, Page 2

The Waikato Times.

Equal and exact justice to all men, Of whatever state or persuasion, religious

or political. Here shall the Press the People's right

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THURSDAY, JULY 10, 1879.

The General -Assembly meets at Wellington to-morrow, for the despatch of business, and none too soon, considering the exceptional position !of Colonial affairs. Within the House and without, the Legislature is beset with difficulties. A financial deficit of very considerable amount, the result of a decrease m land revenue on the one hand ; and of tbe falling off of the estimated Customs returns on the other, will have to be met and provided for by whatever party may succeed m occupying the Government benches. At the same time, a very serious native difficulty m one portion of the North Island calls for the attention and consideration of members. Finance and native affairs are likely to occupy a considerable share of the time of the Assembly. It is absolutely necessary, with the requirement of a loan staring the Colony m the face, that an effort should be made to place the finances of the Colony on a satisfactory footing; and it is equally certain that if settlement is to progress m the North Island without serious interruption, the whole question of native grievances and native disquietude must be gone into and discussed. These two great questions underlie the whole fabric of legislation at the present time. One of the most pressing requirements of the Colony, if we are to continue . the onward march of progress, which New Zealand so successfully entered upon at the commencement of the present decade, is a loan of three, or if practicable, five million., to complete and perfect the fragmentary lines of railway as yet opened, and to provide other important and necessary works of a reproductive nature. It is essentially necessary thereto, that the method of conducting the finan. eial operations of the Colony be re-modelled on some more business-like basis, and that a sound and satisfactory system of finance be established. There has been too ready a resort to expediency, to tiding over deficits by drawing on next years income, through tbe issue of Treasury bills. This is unsound finance. It is not finance indeed, but "financing." And then, as we have said, comes the question of native affairs. It is no use to say that this matter may be put off to some more convenient season. Matters have reached anclji a crisis that delay is no longer practicable. Te Whiti and his ploughmen at Taranaki are forcing the question upon the attention of the Government and the legislature m no unmistakable manner. The sullen and dissatisfied^ attitude of natives m nearly all parts of the North Island, and the position of isolation which they persist m maintaining is evidence of deep-seated suspicion and grievance which needs -to. be discovered and removed. Nor have we far to go to find the root of this cause of discontent. Tho land question is at the bottom of it. The Government m forbidding the native to 'do what he likes with his own, m putting m force on every ordinary occasion the extraordinary power which a clause of an Act gave them to meet only extreme cases, and by Orders m Council "proclaiming" block after block, so that no European oan treat with the Maori owner for it, have inflicted a grievous wrong upon the natives. As the case stands, Europeans may be m treaty for a block of land from the native owners, but the Government can interfere and, by paying a deposit of say even ... only to some one native claimant to the block, proclaim it as beiag under treaty to the Government, and thus exclude all Europeans from dealing with the native owners for it. They thus forbid the owners to sell to any but the Government, and m the absence of competiton the result is that the natives, if anxious to realise, must sell at the Government's own price, or, as more frequently happens, tho land remains unsold. In this way, a double mj u ry ia inflicted on the Colony. The

native race is worked into a state of discontent nnd disquietude, and tbe vast Maori estate m the North Island remains locked ap. And this looking up of something like twenty millions of acre., means a great deal more than at first sight appears. It is not simply that it hinders the work of colonisation and reclamation. It means more than this. It means the exemption of these im mense tracts of .country from bearing their fair share of the burden of taxation. It is nonsense to talk of providing a " free breakfast table " for the working man by some trifling alteration m the incidence of taxa. tion, while the real and palpable i means of making his burden liglit, lies m proclaiming free trade m native lands and allowing these twenty millions of acres, or such portions of them as are not needed for the comfort end maintenance of a more handful of people, to pass into a condition m which they shall contribute their fair share to the taxes of the Colony from the expenditure of which they are daily increasing m value. And to this work of reform m native matters, the Legislature must at once address itself. Delay is fraught with danger. As we showed m a previous article. " We are borrowing money m this country to spend upon public works. The interest of this money has to be paid out of the land of the country. We manufacture nothing for export to speak of, our profits, therefore, or, m other words, our purchasing power from this source is next to nil. The money which enables the population to purchase dutiable articles, and thereby contribute towards the payment of the interest on the borrowed money, comes from the natural resources of the land, m the shape of flax, gum, timber, minerals, cereals and wool. These natural resources are every day becoming more exhausted m our limited area of country, and yet twenty millions of acres must lie idle and unproductive to satisfy a hopeless political fad, m the shape ot a return to the pre emptive right of the Crown. But further, these millions of acres pay no taxes. Not only to they not contribute to the actual producing and purchasing power of the country, but they cannot be reached by direct taxation. No land tax, no road board or county rates affect tho ownersof these vast tiacts of country. The quiet, gradual, but certain growth of the colony m population, renders this property, year by year, more valuable, until at last it will be impossible to find the money to pay the vast sums demanded to satisfy the " unearned increment " accrded to the dark skinned landed aristocracy which will have arisen. We can tax a white squatocraoy, which is so hateful to our plilantiophic Premier, but the brown one must go free. In ten years, all chance of getting land for settlement will have gone by, and if the whole country is to continue to be locked up by " Proclamation," our producing taxpaying power will be, by no means, adequate to sustain the drain of a million and a-half ready money leaving the country yearly m payment of interest." These cardinal questions, then, finance, and native affairs—the latter of which presents a double-headed difficulty m the West Coast embroglio and the settlement of the land sale question generally— 'demand the first consideration of tbe Assembly, and so pressing are tbey, that mere abstract questions, if necessary, must give way for a time. Political and social reforms can only be carried out m times of quietude; The present is not a suitable one, with the public mind of the colonists on the one hand agitated for the last four years by Sir . George Grey's inflamatory speeches, and on the other the native mind burning and seething like a slumbering volcano, with the sense of grievous wrong inflicted by the exercise of such an arbitrary and autocratic power as we have referred to. If, then, m the coming session of the Assembly, the Legislature shall satisfactorily solve these two problems of good government, the Colony will fore-go, for a time,. the discussion of those *' burning questions." which are said to he so necessary for the "amelioration of the , human race."