The Press. WEDNESDAY, MAY 8, 1872.

Press, Volume XIX, Issue 2813, 8 May 1872, Page 2

The Press. WEDNESDAY, MAY 8, 1872.

W£-have frequently had occasion to notice the reticence of the whole Ministerial press on the Bubject of finance. They are loud enough on many other -subjects, hut an .this they scarcely ever cay a word. The comparative state of the revenue andexpenditure, the state of the loan account, the amount of liabilities undertaken, and of charges incurred for interest—everything, in . short, that bears upon the financial condition of the colony—are matters on which, aa a rule, they maintain a profound eilence. What shows that this eilence is preserved for a particular object is that, when they do venture to offer any remark, it is not to inform but to mislead the public. "We had a remarkable instance some time time ago in their statements respecting the loan expenditure. Mr Sewell bad declared that the first instalment of the loan would be all spent, or within £100,000 or co, by the end of 1871. We never could j understand why this prediction produced such an explosion of Ministerial wrath. Mr Sewell did not say the money would be wasted. He simply maintained that, if Go- j •vernment carried out the scheme of expenditure they had determined on, their supplies would be virtually exhausted by the end of the year. "Whether this proved to be the case or not was a plain matter of fact, upon which the public were much interested in being correctly informed. ! Yet it is a fact on which the Minis- j terial journals have invariably sought to keep them in the dark. When a return was published in the Gazette, showing that the total expenditure un-, der the Public Works and Immigra- j

tion Act, up to 31 et December last, bad amounted to £628,781, they held it up ac a complete refutation of Mr $$weil. They triumphed over it, ac

a most gratifying account, aa one that ebowed the position of the colony to be eminently satisfactory. They carefully ignored the fact that £450"00 aof the £1,200,000 borrowed waa a part of the Defence loan, and was not included in the return. Had they wished to deal candidly with their readers, they would ha -, e acknowledged that, besides ..-the- £750,000 accounted for in the Gazette the whole of this £450,000 had been spent or engaged for; and that, at the utmost, Government had at their credit on the 31st December (now more than four months ago) only £140,000 But tne Southern Gross, in its zeal to serve its patrons' interests, took a much bolder course. It was not content with implying that ha f the £1,200,000 was"still unexpended; it openly stated as much in co many words. The Gazette seems to be uncommonly slow in reaching Auckland, so that the official return in question did not come under the notice of the Northern papers till long after it has been discussed in the South. But when the Southern Cross did get hold of it, it made up for lost time. It came out next morning with a flaming leader in honor and glory of Ministers. " These published accounts," it declared, were " the practical answer of the Government to the loose assertions of the Opposition that the whole of the £1,200,000 negotiated in London last year was already exhausted." Pleasantly varying the figures of arithmetic with figures of rhetoric, it compared the Government to " a monitor engaging a cockle-boat," aud their accounts to "a millstone hurled to destroy a bevy of moths." It gave an abstract of the tables, according to which the expenditure on public works and immigration, up to Uecember 31, amounted to £570,531. And " thus it is shown," the Gross triumphantly exclaimed, " that, at the end of December last, instead of the whole of the borrowed money being expended, less than one-half of it was drawn upon for any purpose whatever. In point of fact the account shows that little over onefourth of the £1,200,000 was actually expended up to date ; the other proportion is set down for liabilities." And thereupon followed a boisterous glorification over the discomfiture of the Opposition, the wet blanket thrown on them by the facts and figures .from the Gazette, and the humiliating exposure of their misrepresentations, which must excite the indignation of every one who had any respect for honesty and truth. Surtout Messieurs, Talleyrand used to say to his underlings, point de zele. Had the nnhappy writer in the Cross remembered this maxim, he would not have fallen into such a horrible mess. He would never have cut such a etiek for his own back. For all hia invective against misrepresentation and misleading of the public recoils on himself. It is he who has grossly misrepresented the case ; he who has misled his readers by reckless and untrue assertions. The facts and figures which he parades so vaingloriously, and makes the ground of such triumph over the Opposition, are —when applied as he applies them, to the whole of the first instalment of the loan— absolutely false. He roundly asserts that, on the 31st December, not half the £1,200,000 borrowed had been drawn upon for any purpose whatever. He does not know that only £750,000 was borrowed on account of public works ; that the account in the Gazette is confined to that £750,000; that the entire loan expenditure, instead of £570 000, had been nearly £1,100,000; and that, instead of more than one - half being unspent,the available balance did not reach one-eighth. Thus iv ostentatiously exposing the ignorance and misrepresentations of others, he betrays his own total ignorance, and is guilty of downright mis-statements, which need all the excuse that ignorance can give them to be spared a much harsher term.

Had these mis-statements appeared in some obscure out-of-the-way journal, monstrous as they are, they might have been allowed to pass unnoticed. But the Southern Gross, as ia well known, is one of the oldest papers in New Zealand, and ranks among the vary first—is perhaps the very first — of those in the North Island. It is the leading journal in Auckland, the property of a Cabinet Minister, and is altogether a paper for which the people of Auckland have a right to look for for authentic information on all matters of public interest. Tet this is the sort of stuff they get. On a question of the greatest importance, the expenditure of the loan, whoever trusts to the Southern Cross will find himself egregioualy deceived. He is led to believe—nay, is positively assured, that the Government have spent half a million less than they actually have ; and the fiction is supported by violent abuse of those who dare to tell him how the account really stands. This is the course that has been adopted by our Ministerial contemporaries, North and South. They have deliberately suppressed all mention of the expenditure on Defence and other purposes, have either expressly stated or implied that the whole £1,200,000 borrowed last year was available for public works, and have thus endeavored to create an impression (totally unfounded and erroneous) that the Government are still largely in funds. We shall make no comment on this mode of proceeding, or on its objects; the public can form their own opinion.