AN EXPENSIVE FARCE.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 324, 13 July 1889, Page 2

AN EXPENSIVE FARCE.

That great and powerful organisation known as the Native Department continues to be a butt for the missiles of those who have reason to regret the existence of such a relic of days that were, yet reither reason nor declamation appear to have the least weight in creating a desire for reform. People are now of a more enquiring turn of mind than they were in those days when the Native Department was practically the Government of New Zealand, and this desire for enlightenment and the asking of inconvenient questions may have done some good, but it takes a great amount of good to have any effect on a rotten foundation. From all parts of the colony directly interested in Native matters there come strong symptoms of dissatisfaction at the administration, and our old friend Mr T. W. Lewis is the light that still shines over this volume of discontent. A correspondent in Otorohanga writes to an Auckland journal!—“The power exercised by the Ministry of New Zealand in granting, or withholding, titles to the ascertained owners of native lands, after all the prescribed legal enquiries have been made, appears to be controlled by no statute, and is governed by no known rule. ... The effect of such uncertain and irregular proceedings has had a most prejudicial effect on the Settlement of the Country, has also cost an expenditure of large sums of public money, and has inflicted far greater injury on the natives, in the majority of cases, than it has ever done any good, to those whose interests it has professed to conserve. These reflections naturally arise from the intelligence that a Commissioner is about to be, or is already appointed to report to the Government, as to whether the Native Land Court and the Chief Judge were right in refusing a re-hear-ing to certain large blocks in the West Taupo districts."

There is a grim satisfaction in knowing that this district is not the only one badly treated; it at least is an assurance that our estimate of the Department, and some of those who exercise control in it, is hot lower than the circumstanced warrant. The Napier Telegraph states that “.a great deal more naight-be said about Government interference with Maoris in respect of their lands. This interference is constantly showing itself in the shifting about of the Judges of the Native Linds Courts, running them about from post to pillar, so that the business gazetted to be brought forward is not completed. If questioned about it, the Government would say that there were not enough Judges, but. urged as the Cabinet have been to appoint judges to native districts very little has been done to further the settlement of native lands. The Native Department, which everybody had hoped would long ago have been swept away, is nearly as mischievous as when it was regarded as the ‘ Great Mystery ’ of the colony. It not seldom works in direct opposition of the law, and titles are delayed or issued at the caprice of the Administration, and the administration is presumably that of Mr T. W. Lewis.” Most of the Judges seem to gradually work into the groove of official inaptitude, and greatly prefer taking things easy to setting themselves with diligenceto the really hard work that often comes before them. There is, indeed, very often the reverse of encouragement to a Judge who tries to honestly do his duty, for when a man does earnestly take up a complicated case he too frequently finds that when he has got half through it he is transferred to another district, leaving behind him a mass of uncompleted work, and bearing in mind the unpleasant fact that suitors have been put to an enormous expense for absolutely no purpose. " If,” says our contemporary, " anything is calculated to impair the dignity of their position, to make them careless or indifferent in the discharge of their wearisome and irksome duties, it is that they are placed under the finger and thumb of a department which treats them as its servants.”