NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 257, 26 July 1930, Page 10

NOTES OF THE DAY

Within two months of accession to office the Forbes Government has announced new levies or increased taxes amounting to £2,610,000. The estimated yield from the various items are: Customs, come and land taxes, etc., £1,660,000; unemployment levy, £450,000; petrol tax, £450,000. The returns from several of the individual items seem to have been most conservatively estimated, and it will not be surprising if the total revenue from new imposts or higher rates on old reaches three millions.

Bookmakers have reason to be pleased at the Government § decision to .increase the tax on totalisator investments by another 2| per cent. Practically all of them work on totalisator starting prices in which the odds are shortened against the bettor by the amount of the tax on the pool. By Raising the tax, the Government certainly secures more revenue but it will also automatically increase the profits of the bookmakers. Previously the odds offered were 10 per cent, plus dividend tax shorter than the pool justified; now they will be short by 124 per cent, plus dividend tax. “It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good.” * * » ♦

Competent observers in the Old Country have perceived heartening signs of the silver lining in the clouds. According to the reports of experts to the British Cabinet Committee on Unemployment, the end of the great slump is in sight, with the possibility of early trade revival.” Another authority, Sir Frederick Lewis, head of the big shipping firm of Furness, Withy and Company, expresses his confidence in the imminence of a trade revival, “which,” he says, “will come as surely as anything which it is possible to predict.” This is the right spirit. Something of the same kind is needed in this country to demonstrate to our panic budgeteers that time, not the stifling of enterprise by excessive taxation, is the winning factor. /

In the demolition of Quinton’s Corner to make room for the Wellington City War Memorial, there passes an ancient landmark identified with a community unknown to the present generation. One by one, the traces of Wellington’s early beginnings as a city are disappearing. Such changes are inevitable. Sentiment may express regret, but progress insists upon their removal. Gone are the days when sheep were driven along Lambton Quay, and ox-teams pulled up in front of what was formerly known as “Winder’s Corner” at the intersection of Cuba and Manners Streets. If the rider of the ’nineties,. ambling along the main thoroughfares, were to look for the hitching-posts in front of the hotels and shops along the Quay, Willis and Manners Streets, he would look in vain. “This progress,” the gentleman in Mr. Britling Sees it Through remarks, “this progress, it keeps on.” There was even a day when a duel was fought in Wellington. But that, as Kipling would say, is “another story.”

Public attention in England has again been turned upon the problem of safety in aviation. The Meopham disaster involved the loss of six lives. There have been other air fatalities where the loss of life has been as great, even greater. In this particular instance, however, the personalities concerned were of such social repute as to magnify the tragedy to the point of a public sensation. The accident rate as between flying and motoring is greatly to the advantage of the former, but it is less easy, for obvious reasons, to dissect the causes of aircraft crashes. It is, therefore, really remarkable that scientific engineering has made aviation comparatively so safe when the unknown quantity, accident causation, is so difficult to determine. Many air pioneers have given their lives in the investigation of safety factors in nying. It is to their daring and self-sacrifice that aviation has acquired the knowledge it has of what is impossible and what is not. There is a melancholy consolation in the fact that out of the searching investigation now being made into the Meopham tragedy, further data for the guidance of aircraft designers and engineers may emerge.