POST AND TELEGRAPH RATES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21110, 18 February 1932, Page 8

POST AND TELEGRAPH RATES.

Upon the plea that revenue must be maintained as far as possible, the Postmaster-General has indicated that the Government intends to maintain the increased rates for postal and telegraphic services. The proposal would be more tolerable if there were any evidence that the higher rates, introduced at the beginning of last March, had achieved the declared purpose of increasing the revenue. It was manifest at the time that the attempt to use the Post Office as an instrument of taxation was a foolish blunder, and that public resentment at the raising of charges when the Government was proclaiming the necessity for reducing costs would be directly reflected in the department's receipts. In these circumstances, the forecast that the additional rates would produce £900,000 in postal revenue alone was ludicrous, nor was there any better justification for counting in the Budget programme upon a surplus of £1,090,000 from Post Office profits, in addition to the statutory capital charge. How far actual results have fallen short of these extravagant speculations cannot be ascertained, for the department has concealed the failure of the scheme by withholding the usual quarterly returns. Some light is thrown on the situation by the appearance in the latest accounts of the Consolidated Fund of the first contribution of Post and Telegraph Department profits to the Budget. It is £154,000. The Budget represented the additional charges as the means of increasing the department's profits by more than one-fourth of the gross revenue in 1930-31. In nine months, the department has actually paid to the Treasury only as much as a fortnight's gross earnings in 1930-31. It is therefore idle to talk of maintaining the revenue by the continued enforcement of punitive rates. It would be more rational and more creditable to admit that a mistake was made a year ago and to announce measures for expanding the revenue by making the services cheap enough to be used.