PARLIAMENT AND THE PURSE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21168, 28 April 1932, Page 8

PARLIAMENT AND THE PURSE.

The emergency session has now reached such a stage that its end is being predicted for the near future, while forecasts suggest that only one more measure of any moment, a Finance Bill, is likely to appear. So far nothing has been done—and unless action is taken by the Finance Bill nothing will be done—about a very important recommendation the National Expenditure Commission made. In its report the commission said: "The permanent appropriations represent an unduly large portion of the public expenditure. This, we find, is due to the indiscriminate introduction in financial measures of the words 'without further appropriation than this Act, which practically has had the effect of depriving Parliament for all time of the ability to review and control the annual expenditure." The commission, therefore, recommended that many permanent appropriations should be brought under annual review: it remarked that the Treasury had advocated this reform, the Auditor-General had commented adversely in 1928 on the large proportion of annual expenditure exempt from annual appropriation : it concluded "We arc strongly of the opinion that it would be in the interests of national finance in this Dominion to dispense with permanent appropriations to a very large extent." The whole of this comment was thoroughly justified, the recommendation should be accepted and applied without any delay. The extent to which Parliament has renounced, in piecemeal fashion, its right to control expenditure from the public purse in recent years has indeed been remarkable. That right, as a constitutional principle, was won at great cost in the process of British political evolution. Its importance is supposed to be summed up in the maxim "Supply shall not be granted until grievances are redressed," which is supposed to dominate every debate on an Appropriation Bill. Yet, in New Zealand practice the principle and the maxim grow faint because the power to vote, or to control, supply has been cast away to such an extent by Parliament itself.