is ending

Signs that New Hebrides land rush is ending

From a Vila correspondent

It seems that, four months after its publication, the New Hebrides’ legislation aimed at stopping specu lative land subdivision is beginning to have its effect.

Since that time the subdividers have been sitting back on their haunches and thinking hard about ways and means of circumventing the legislation, but it doesn’t look as if they have had much luck.

There are now clear indications that the more inflated land prices are beginning to fall.

Even so, according to people in terested in developing the islands eco nomically, the high prices are still frightening off potential hoteliers, ranchers and industrialists.

“Take just one plot of land near Vila,” said Joe Mulders, secretary of the New Hebrides Chamber of Com merce, recently, “four and a half acres and a good potential hotel site but they’re asking a quarter of a million dollars for it—with no ser vices! It’s been on the market 16 months and still no sign of a buyer —and we’ve had any number of hotel people come here looking for sites.”

Another block cited by Mr.

Mulders is only one hectare and not even suitable for an hotel site, but it is still priced at between $lOO,OOO and $llO,OOO.

It is not only hotels that are being put off. Several people genuinely in terested in cattle raising have been unable to overcome the problem of the high cost of land.

' Grossly inflated and bearing no relationship to the land’s true econo mic value,” is how a British financial development adviser, Alan Collings, describes prices.

"If the New Hebrides becomes an associate member of the European Common Market, exports from here will obtain preferential rates. This means an ideal climate in which to develop light industry, but land prices are frightening away worthwhile de velopment.”

Mr. Collings has spent the past

two and a half years as member of a team advising the three Western Paci fic High Commission territories on economic development.

He points out that Vila land prices have been close to those of central industrial sites in Sydney or Mel bourne. Fully serviced central in dustrial land in Sydney is currently being offered at between $90,000 and $170,000 an acre. For comparison, a H acre block in Vila—no services —was advertised recently at $131,000!

However, Hawaii still maintains its ban on Hawaiian residents purchasing New Hebrides land, and the word about the land legislation, and the even tougher immigration laws, is spreading in the other main specula tive markets in South East Asia. (Vietnam has been a prime target “take your Vietnamese bride to the New Hebrides”—you can’t take her home to Mom.) Other factors are the less-than happy economic situation in New Caledonia and, of course, the general decline in world financial conditions.

The prognosis then would seem to be a continuing fall in land prices and, let us hope, a return to sane and organised economic progress in the New Hebrides.

The condominium chants the litany of every other Pacific territory; “Who wants another Honolulu?”