THE BUDGET DEBATE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 29 July 1941, Page 4

THE BUDGET DEBATE

THE Budget debate will be taken upi in the House again to-day and ap-| parently will continue so long as! speakers are forthcoming. While the ■ decision of the Opposition to with- j draw from it can be appreciated after some of the aimless party wrangling which went on last week under the guise of discussion on the financial statement, the result has been that the country has had very little clear analysis of the implications of the Government’s proposals. With one or two exceptions Labour speakers have loudly praised the Budget and have cast Mr Nash in the role of fairy godfather dispensing largesse to the people generally. The fact that he is going to borrow a large part of what he dispenses has been passed over lightly. When Labour came into office it decried borrowing as an outworn method of finance which simply mortgaged the future. Yet borrowing is the mainstay of the present Budget. It proposes an expenditure of £139,100,000. Of this £63,713,000 is to be found from new taxation. After other adjustments have been made it appears that the Government intends to borrow, in round figures, about £57.000,000. This represents the increase to New Zealand’s national debt for a single year, making an addition thereto for the last two years of £83,000,000. If this was entirely due to the war then it would be willingly borne, but a large part cf it is due to the continuation of civil expenditure on the scale that the country has learned to expect from the Government and to fighting a war as well. These are some of the salient facts which might have been emphasised, by Opposition speakers in the House j without following the bad example, of party recrimination. Many of the public doubtless fee! that everything is all right because the rates of taxa- | tion against them have not been rais- j ed. And yet considerably more money has to be found. The method of Mr Nash’s budget is to be lenient now and carry a lump of the burden forward to the future. Such procedure makes it easy to be generous. When electors are listening to or reading reports of Budget, debaters telling what the Government j is giving to the people they also want j to bear in mind how such generosity has been made possible in wartime, j They will hear little about it from 1 the speakers.