VICTORIAN FINANCE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVI, Issue 121, 20 November 1908, Page 7

VICTORIAN FINANCE.

THE BUDGET STATEMENT. By Telegraph.— Press Association.— Copyright. MELBOURNE, 19th November. In the Legislative Assembly this afternoon, Sir Thomas Bent, Premier and Treasurer, delivered his Budget statement. The statement showed the following figures for the year 1907-8: — £ Revenue ... .... 8,288,508 Expenditure 7,848,357. Surplus £440,151 Estimates for the current yeai were as follow : — JS Revenue 8,116,250 Expenditure ... ' ... 8,115,153 Anticipated surplus £1,097 Sir Thomas Bent announced that the Government intended to pursue a bold railway and waterworks extension policy, and Loan Bills would be brought in during the present session and early next year to raise the necessary money to carry out this policy. Altogether, under the credit fonder system, £2,254,000 had been advanced to settlers, and arrears of repayments amounted to only £473. The railway revenue, £0,874,000, had only once previously been exceeded. The value of imports during the year had increased by nearly £3,000,000 The revenue for 1906-07 was £8,313,241, and the expenditure £7,501,031, the surplus being £812,210. Referring to a policy speech delivered by Sir Thomas Bent on the 12th instant, The Age remarked: — "His financial declarations are all so much myth and make-believe . . . But his chief triumph of insincerity related to his surplus excesses remaining after haying provided for the- deficit reductions. These balances, he says, totalled a aum of £905,368, a^d not one penny of that money was expended in largesse ; £313,843 went on railways and other works ; £166,251 on schools ; £85,00G on mmmg t development ; £61,000 on asylums and hospitals ; £190,064 on works and buildings, and tho remainder, a mere £89,310, on municipal and other grants. Appaiently, therefore, the hugely increased municipal subsidies (£90,000 only last year was spent on roads alone, a great part of which should have been provided locally by the shires), the unjustifiable inci'eass in grants to charities and the innumerable doles to all manner of money hunters which the Premier has unstintedly lavished during his term of office, all came out of his own pocket, and were not furnished by the State at all. Nobody will be deceived by these ludicrously manipulated figures. The Premier's policy speech proclaims him a political bankrupt. It will be Parliament's duty when \Ji& House meets to sweep him out of power to work the country further injury. . . It is not too much to say that tho constituencies are almost as dissatisfied with Parliament as with the person to whose leadership Parliament has submitted so inertly, so ineptly, and so Jong."