FUTURE FINANCE AND PUBLIC WORKS.

Evening Post, Volume LVI, Issue 78, 29 September 1898, Page 4

FUTURE FINANCE AND PUBLIC WORKS.

Finance is scarcely the strong point of the Minister for Public Works, but the clerk who prepared his Statement should at least have taken the trouble to make the figures given in it agree with the published accounts of the Treasury. In the Public Works Statement it is said that during the past financial year "The expenditure has amounted to £865,543, , which left a balance at the end of the year of £326,492." This is said of the Public Works Fund. Now, the fact is that the balance in the Public Works Fund on the 31st March last was but £51,492. This sum of £326,492 is got by adding £275,000 authorised to be borrowed, but which was not borrowed up to the 31st March last; £110,000 of the amount was borrowed in the June quarter, and very probably the balance may have been borrowed in the current September quarter. It appears to us that this wrong statement of the balance in the Public Works Fund is put in to cloak the borrowing that has to be resorted to this year. We may state what that borrowing is to be : — £ Already authorised ... ... 275,000 To be authorised , 500,000 Sinking Fund 36,500 Loan under Local Bodies Act 50,000 £861.500 This is a considerable sum of borrowed money for one fund. If we add to this amount the borrowings under the Land for Settlements Act — about £400.000 — and £75,000 under the Local Bodies Loans Act and for conversions, we shall have at least £1,250,000. This will not be a bad record for a nou-boi rowing Government. We have included the £36,500 of Sinking Fund, as that sum at present goes to reduce our net debt. If it is put in the Public Works Fund in conversions, and not used to pay off debt, our net debt will be increased by that amount. At present plunging the colon}' into debt is popular, and our protest against the continued increase of our debt ma}' pass unheeded. It is well, however, that both Parliament and people should realise what is beinsr done. The Public Works Statement and the Financial Statement alike fail to place before the people how ourdebtis increasing. Theamountof borrowed money now spent is more than double what it was in 1890, and there seems no end to the increasing of our indebtedness to the foreign capitalist. ' There is another financial matter that is not referred to in Mr. Hall-Jones's Statement, atid that is the liabilities existing on the 31st March. They were no h«ss than £415,665 ! What they are*now, when six months of the year tire gone, it would be hazardous to speculate. We presume fresh commitments have been made. The control of Parliament over our finances is of the slightest, and if the present sj'stem of voting moneys some seven months after the financial year has begun is continued the little control there is will vanish.