The Dominion. MONDAY, MAY 15, 1911. MR. MILLAR ON MR. MILLAR.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1127, 15 May 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. MONDAY, MAY 15, 1911. MR. MILLAR ON MR. MILLAR.

.. . frPromotion to Ministerial rank frequently alters very fundamentally a member of Parliament's conception of the proper, principles of government and an ingenious sophist might be able to advance a plausible defence for such a change. But even the sophist must retire from such a task as defending a Minister who, in office, puts forward as facts assertions that he has himself shown to bo not facts at all. This is the case of Mr. Millar. In his Dunedin speech he made the following statement :

Since the Government of the day took office in IS9I, no less a sum than £8,030,000 had been transferred from tho Consolidated Fund to the Public Works Fund, which, if it had not been done, would havo required to have been borrowed, and they would have been paying interest on it to-day.

This is a stock argument of the Government, and is jutfc as misleading in every particular as it was when, in 19U4, tlie Colonial Treasurer said in his Financial Statement:

For the past thirteen years transfers of moneys from tho Consolidated I'und to the resources of the Public Works 1 a.ni have been regularly made in amounts.ranging from thirty thousand to five hundred thousand pounds. These contributions make a grand total of . . Supposing we had borrowed in tho London market,-an amount of money equivalent to the sums transferred to the Public Works Fund, totalling, as I have Stated,- and were payins interest on those loans . .-. our interest charges would have been increased by tho.very large sum of <£119,500 annually. - -. ■ -

In 390-1 Mr. Millar was a private member, enjoying perfect freedom to say what he chose of the then Colonial Treasurer's financial statements, and little dreaming that Fate would in a very few years force him into the-position of Acting-Minister of Finance. " .....

Accordingly he bluntly" attacked the paragraph we have quoted from the 1904 Statement. He admitted that.the £3,750,000 had been "transferred," "but," he added, "he has never transferred that out of the surplus revenues of the colony," and ho then proceeded to_ make the following statement, which in its lucidity and truth is to the fogginess and fallacy of his Dunedin speech in the exact ratio of the freedom of Mr. Millab the private member to the fetters of. the Hon. J. A. Millab, Acting-Minister of Finance:

Let us take the year 1592, when we first took office. Wo started that year with a balance of c£630,6(i0. Then, if we t.ikc the Tovenuo year by year from all*sources, it will be found that the total revenue received for the whole of these years amounts b .■eeo.o29,.l2B—that is, up to this year £1804]— whilst the total expenditure durins that period has ]>een <£tM,-155,000, leaving a balaiico ef surplus revenue gross to the amount of .£1,331,402. But as they commenced the year 1892 with a credit balance of J.'SGO,OOO, and only finished up the year 1901 with £(119,000—you have to take another .£210.000 from that before yon get al tho result—the net result is £1,171,(177 k the amount so transferred. How has the rest been made up ? Here is tho whole thing. Kelcased sinking funds, £1,234,065. Can that be regarded as revenue? Was uot that money a special charge on the people of this colony for the reduction of our debts? And, then, you have added to the debt of the colony by taking that amount. Then you have, again, the sale of debentures against accretions to sinking funds. Derived from that source is the amount of £1,538,000. Then you come to tho sale of Crown lands, £1,254,070, or a total of £4,02G,135 from sources outside of revenue, which have really increased the debt of the colony by being transferred to the Public Works Fund.

And to-day Mn. Millar says, of this jugglery thai it is something to bo glad of! He says to-day that it results in the saving of interest on money that would otherwise have had to be borrowed. In 1904 he said it resulted in an actual loss:

Ho [the Colonial Treasurer] says that if that money had not been used for this purpose we should have had to pay .£119,800 in interest. But if this sum of money had been allowed to lie at 3 per cent, interest it would have given ,£120,000 during the same period; if at 3J per cent it would have been ,£UO,000; and as ho lias credited these sums at 3V and 4 per cent, in this Statement, I sav we mi»ht fairly credit the others at 3\ per cent, and that would have given ,£140,000 per annum, which we should have been receiving instead of ,£119,000 he claims to have saved. So from that point of view there has been nothing saved to the colony at all, but a loss of ,£20,000.

There are other excellent passages in this speech of 1904 which expose the fallacies in the speech in Dunedin last week. There could, indeed, be no more destructive criticism to the Dunedin speech than the speech that Me. Millar could deliver if, carefully following the line he took in 1904, he brought his then figures up to date. But, of course, ho could nbt do that. It is his business to father to-day the fallacies he exposed in 1904. Who can any longer, in the circumstances, repose any confidence in the tissue of inaccuracies and fallacies that the defence of the Government's financial methods i'e' quires'!