THE WEALTHY SHALL PAY

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17965, 10 March 1930, Page 9

THE WEALTHY SHALL PAY

TAXATION POLICY. A MINISTERIAL ADDRESS. "We believe that the people best able to pay should do so,” said the Minister of Lands, Hon. D. A. Ransom, referring during an address at Tahuna on Saturday to taxation. The Minister had been speaking of land settlement and of the necessity for opening up and developing the vast areas of unoccupied Crown lands, of which a stocktaking was now being made. Settlers, he said, would he put on 'these lands and would be assisted. To do that a large amount of capital expenditure would be necessary. If the people to be put on these lands were, however, to toe called upon to pay back interest and principal they would never get anywhere. It should be seen ‘that the burden was carried by the people most able to carry it. The Government had met with considerable opposition to the taxation of incomes, but the Government held that where a wealthy farmer had land the unimproved value of which exceeded £14,000 he should pay land or income tax, whichever was the greater. Such people, many of whom either got large areas of land at a very cheap rate years ago or had inherited it from wealthy parents, should only be .too glad to help the settlers who were going back to conditions which existed in the early pioneering days, a help which they themselves would have welcomed. (Applause.) Many of them who previously had evaded taxation and who had now been caught did not, however, seem to like it.