THE BIG VICTORIAN SURPLUS.

Auckland Star, Volume XX, Issue 289, 5 December 1889, Page 4

THE BIG VICTORIAN SURPLUS.

The Victorian surplus of £1,704,845 at the close of the last financial year, which made the mouth of the New Zealand Treasurer water, has not proved an unmitigated blessing. The "Age" states: "Our heavy surplus, apparently, has induced enormous, if not"profligate, expenditure; and to-day we have to face the unpleasant task of making, ac the end of the session, financial arrangements to avoid something like a suspension of public works. The expenditure for the first quarter of the financial year amounted to no less than £4,403,994, which, debited against the revenue received for that period, has reduced the magnificent surplus with which we opened July to £142,497." Parliament lias lately authorised another loan of £2,380,565 for new railway and irrigation works, so that our neighbours, despite the large resources placed at their disposal for public works this year from surplus revenue, are determined to draw heavy bills azainst posterity. Victorians, however, usually do things in a very lordly way. In spite of the protests ,of a number of members, who contended that the original contract with Mr Speight (ChiefCommissionerof Railways) and his colleagues should be maintained to the end, the Assembly voted an additional £1,000 to his salary and £500 to; each of the other Commission era. Another scheme which puts our little Parliamentary excursions utterly in the shade has dropped through. The Government thought of taking the members of both Houses over to the New Zealand Exhibition in a special steamer, so that\ the occasion might be honoured in a magnificent sort of way, but when it was found that members wanted to take their wives and families with them, Ministers abandoned the idea as being too costly, and offered in substitution to find berths in the s.s. Mararoa for thirty or forty members, and to frank them over Maoriland for a month or so. For some unknown reason members showed the new proposal a cold shoulder, and it has now practically been abandoned. , In a great variety of ways the Victorians and the New South Welshmen are "eating their cake." Loans follow each other in rapid succession; thousands of men are being employed on public works. This cannot continue for ever, and the day of reckoning can hardly be far off.