The Minister says that vesting is a very slow process. What should be slow about it in the case of land given to allottees? All the inspections and all the engineering works have been done already by the Land Commission before they take over possession from the person from whom they acquired the land. It is only a question of giving a certain number of acres to an allottee. All the engineering problems already have been disposed of. Is that not the practice? The Land Commission have had a good deal of experience in the administration of these matters and I think that where a good allottee is selected and where he carries on satisfactorily for a period of five or six or seven years—the period should be fairly short—then at the earliest moment the holding should be vested in him in order to give him that confidence that a person who occupies land should have. Once the holding is vested in him, he and his family will be in a position to buckle into it, make a good job of it, drain it and improve it in various ways. By the force of his work and ability, and with plenty of farmyard manure, he will be laying the foundation of a good, prosperous home. Where that can be done, it ought to be done at the earliest moment.
This practice of holding on to land for a number of years is bad in principle. It is a wrong procedure, in my opinion. I would rather see a provision inserted so that where allottees are found to be bad tenants, even after the holdings are vested in them, they should be put out, than that they should be allowed to block the progress of good tenants, good men and women, with their sons and daughters, who are glad to get land and glad to have an opportunity of improving it. Those people who prove they are worthy of getting a holding and who make a good job of it and make a decent livelihood out of it, should be encouraged. The sooner these people are firmly planted on the land the better for themselves and the better for the State.
We should like to have the Minister's views on this matter. Is he going to hold up all the good people who want to be firmly established on the land, simply because there are numbers of people, limited numbers, who are only anxious to get land with the intention, the moment they get it, that they will sell it and make money? I would prefer if we prepared some machinery adequate to deal with such people at any period sooner than that we should keep in mid-air, as it were, for a long number of years, the good people, the people who are good from the point of view of being deserving allottees. I think it would be unfortunate to vest the land in those who have no intention of making a good job of it. Such a practice would not, in my opinion, tend to achieve the end that we all have in view when we are imposing taxation in order to provide land for these people.