in the WAIKATO

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 11, 2 July 1945, Page 3

in the WAIKATO

A Korero Report

Nine miles from Ngaruawahia, among the low, rounded hills of the Waikato, is the Paerangi Soldiers’ Settlement. Here the 530 acre Paerangi Estate has been divided into five farms which are being taken over by the settlers on favourable terms and in very good order. In part, at least, the servicemen owe their exceptional opportunity to a number of Hamilton business men, in particular to the former owners, Messrs. A. Miller and G. W. Vercoe, who accepted for the property a good deal less than the market price, and to Mr. D. V. Bryant, who financed the purchase through the Bryant House Trustees. There have been other similar ventures in the district. Through the Waikato Land Settlement Society, during the slump of the “ thirties,” unemployed men were placed on once derelict land in three areas — Whatawhata, close to Cambridge, and near Te Awamutu. The Maoris have been helped through by Princess Te Puea, who has a well-ordered farm at Ngaruawahia. And the farms of the Bryant Trust, established twenty years ago by Mr. Bryant, maintain Bryant House in which thousands of convalescent children have spent health-giving holidays. All have arisen from the same impulse—that • those who have received their wealth from the country must give something in return or the present system cannot continue. As Mr. Bryant puts it: “ Under our present laws a man may possess 100,000 acres or £10,000,000, or both. This is bad. After my study of the continental countries I am convinced that we must alter all this or even the heads of the very rich will fall.” Similar views are held by Mr. Harry Valder, who has been associated with

Mr. Bryant in some of his enterprises. Mr. Valder has interested himself in the relations between employer and employee. To bring about better relations he has admitted employees into partnership in the Waikato Times Company, of which he was managing director, and has given £7,500 to the University of New Zealand to enable an investigation to be made into social relations in industry. The proposals of both men have been written into the laws of this country in legislation which allows land to be held under the Bryant tenure, neither freehold nor leasehold but usehold, and allowing shares to be given to employees without a cash payment for them as in the case of the Waikato Times Company. What these men have done in the past is important to-day because in the settlement of the Paerangi Estate, an interesting experiment in rehabilitation, the same principles have been followed. The basis of the scheme is that if men are to be placed on the land, particularly servicemen, they must be established on terms that will give them a chance to be successful. In the process some contribution may have to be madeas in this case—by well-to-do private individuals, but that contribution, in the opinion of Mr. Bryant and his associates is an obligation placed on the wealthy because of their position. In return for it they receive an indirect benefit as members of a prosperous community, since if the men were to be settled on less favourable terms they would probably fail, the State would lose the capital it had risked, and, with hundreds of bankrupt settlers needing assistance, the country as a whole would suffer. “It is not philanthropy,’’ says Mr. Bryant. “ I hate the word. It is good business.”

The Waikato is a suitable district in which to demonstrate this theory of good business. The southern half of the Auckland Province contains one-sixth of the farmers of the whole Dominion. In climate, soil, and configuration it is ideal for closer settlement, and its farms, most of which range from 50 acres to 100 acres, are. highly productive. The dairy output of the Auckland Province in one year has reached four million boxes of butter and three hundred thousand crates of cheese, the largest proportion of it from the Waikato. Yet, although much money has been made here, fortunes have not been piled up without effort. Fifty years ago farmers were working hard and long to exchange two tons of carrots for a mackintosh, to sell six and a half tons of really fine potatoes for a profit of 13s. With the development of dairying, however, reward came. At the age of forty, for example, Mr. Bryant found himself a rich man engaged among other things, in exporting bobby-calf meat to Glasgow long before this industry became a national enterprise. He understood farming, he was a sound judge of stock, he knew the Waikato thoroughly. He was worth about £60,000. Half his fortune he set aside to provide for his family ; with the other half, consisting of farm properties and stock, he established the Bryant Trust, and to the Trust he gave also as honorary manager his experience and his capabilities. With that money Bryant House was built on Raglan Heads, and has since been maintained at a cost of £3,000 a year in wages alone. Here thousands of ailing

children have enjoyed healthy holidays, 60 at a time, 300 in a season, which lasts from November to May. At first open only to children, Bryant House was later opened to mothers also between May and November; and from December, 1939, to February, 1943, it was used as a convalescent home for servicemen. Since then it has been opened again to women and children. In spite of the cost of maintenance of Bryant House, the assets of the Trust, under the management of the founder, have grown to £120,000. It is this large fund which has enabled the Trust to provide another £3,000 a year to give holidays to the wives and children of men overseas. This work, which has been going on since December, 1942, is carried on through the Bryant House Hospitality Society, which is advised by a committee on which are represented the Plunket Society, the Women’s War Services Auxiliary, the Returned Services’ Association, and the Red Cross. Outside Hamilton this work is being taken up by the Rehabilitation Civic League, which is also concerned with finding accommodation for returned servicemen who in the present conditions are unable to build, buy, or lease homes for themselves and their families. They are to be found temporary accommodation in large private homes where there is room to spare. These are not its only tasks. According to the official statement “ in general the function of the League is to develop and sustain public interest in rehabilitation and in the welfare of the dependants of servicemen.” Among the founders of the League is Mr. Bryant. Perhaps most important of all to the returned serviceman is that, on the representation of Mr. Bryant, the Government offers to men settling on the land a choice of two forms of leasehold or the Bryant tenure. The Bryant tenure, first used by the Waikato Land Settlement Society, involves two principles. The first concerns the purchase of the properties. Land, under this system, is not bought at the ruling market rate, which may have little relation to what may be taken oft the land. It would, for instance; be

unwise simply because the market was high at the moment of buying to purchase 50 acres of land at £IOO an acre, a total of £5,000, and stock it at a cost of another £5,000, £IO,OOO in all, when over ten years or so that land, in spite of sound farming, has on the average earned interest on only £7,000. The second principle operates when land held under this tenure is to be sold. Once the land has been bought all the rights of freehold are given except the right of free sale. It is not possible under this system to buy 50 acres for £4,000 in one year and sell the same area on a rising market in the next twelve months for £6,000. The sale of the land is not absolutely forbidden, but any sale must have the approval of the proper authority. In the case of the Waikato Land Settlement Society, which was taken over by the Government in 1937, the basis for sales was that the purchase-price with an allowance for improvements, including pasture, should be returned to the settler and that the total price an acre should be assessed on the productivity of the land over a period of years. After ten years of farming the first of the thirty-five farms of the society was recently sold. The farmer, who had not a penny when he began, leaves his . farm with £1,200 in cash and his motor-car. The butterfat cheque for another of the settlers last season was £1,135. Thus the Bryant tenure encourages farming and discourages speculation. In the Government settlements the Bryant principle of purchase is not applied ; the farms are bought on 1942 values. Soldier settlers may, however, take up their farms on the Bryant tenure —that is, with every right of freehold except unrestricted sale—or as leaseholds. In the Paerangi Settlement, a private venture in which the Bryant Trust bought the land from the owners and sold it to the settlers, the Bryant principle of purchase was applied and the tenure is a modified form of the Bryant system in that there can be no free sales for ten years. This system of landholding was devised to meet the needs of the Waikato Land Settlement Society, which was founded in the depths of the slump about early

1932. Mr. Bryant then offered to raise £20,000 for land settlement to relieve unemployment. He was told that it could not be done. He raised £27,000 — £IO,OOO from the Auckland Savings-bank, £I,OOO from his own pocket. He also bought and gave to the society 703 acres of land, while Mr. Valder provided an interest-free loan for five years for the purchase of another 560 acres. And so the Waikato Land Settlement Society began with 4,800 acres of land bought at a cost of £IO,OOO. Later it extended its holdings to 7,000 acres. It was waste land covered with fern, scrub, gorse, ti-tree, and blackberry rising to 15 ft. It was infested with rabbits. Cleared, ploughed, and sown by unemployed labour subsidized by the Government, it was settled with registered unemployed, who bought the land 'at 4| per cent, repayable in thirty years. There were among them bank clerks, plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, and motor salesmenbut they were all workers. In 1936 Mr. Bryant was able to report that if the society were to sell all its cattle and sheep at current values it would clear off its liabilities and still have 6,000 acres of land, thirty-four homesteads and twelve cottages besides £3,000 worth of plant and horses. The land was all held on the Bryant tenure. Through this scheme waste land was made productive, workless men were given not only work, but an opportunity to build a future for themselves, to contribute to the wealth of the country instead of being a drain upon it. What

this meant at that time the settlement at Karakariki illustrates. There were living there in 1936 fourteen permanent settlers and eighty children, fifty under five years of age. Upon the work of the society an agricultural expert in 1937 gave this opinion : “It must be admitted by every one taking the trouble thoroughly to investigate this scheme of what amounts to private settlement that it has so far been extraordinarily successful and that everything points to its developing into one of the outstanding examples of land settlement in New Zealand.” In the Paerangi Soldier Settlement, now being established, there may clearly be seen the influence of the Waikato Land Settlement Society. This 2,530acre property, on which are being settled five men with long service overseas, was sold to the Bryant House Trustees. It was valued at £44,000 —well below current values, and even below the value calculated on its productive capacity over the past ten years—the owners made a further donation of £2,000 and the Bryant Trust another of £2,000. The settlers therefore get it for £40,000. It has been magnificently farmed by the former owners for thirty years, and last year there were sent off it 175 bales of wool. It carries 5,500, breeding ewes in lamb to Southdown

rams and 420 breeding cows and 3,000 wethers which are sold in the winter. Calves from the cows sold recently brought up to £8 Ils. and 580 wethers 375. 6d. on the truck. It is still being administered by the former owners, and the profit until it is subdivided next April will go to the settlers ; over the two seasons which this agreement covers this may amount to over £12,000. The settlers are buying the land from the Bryant Trust, which bought it on their behalf, at 4 per cent., plus sinking fund, so that they have been admitted on favourable terms. There is one restriction, echo of the Bryant tenure : no sale may be made without the permission of the trustees for the first ten years. In the Awakino district another settler has been established on an 8,000-acre property, part leasehold and part freehold, given to the Rehabilitation Civic League by the Bank of New Zealand through Mr. Bryant for soldier settlement on the condition that live-stock and plant should be taken over at valuation. Through all these activities runs the principle that New Zealand owes to all its people, and particularly to the men who have returned from overseas, at least an opportunity to succeed on the land and that those who are in a position to do so ought to make their contribution.