WELLINGTON NOTES.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 83, 12 July 1895, Page 2

WELLINGTON NOTES.

(SPECIAL TO PATBA COUNT! PBES3.) THOSE RETURNS. The Seddon administration has arrived at the conclusion that financial returns are very good subjects to leave alone. As you were told last week, Ministers posi lively refused to give any information whatever regarding the cost of their travelling expenses. Their journeyings during election time, their many junket' iugs,.trips to Australia, to England, and to the uttermost parts of the colony, are shrouded in mystery. All that is known is that a Minister, when travelling in the colony, draws 30s per day, besides his steamer, or coach, fares, his salary, his house allowance, and his private secre tary's expenses, and £3 3s per diem when outside the colony, besides the other per* quisites. Neither will Mr Seddon conde scend to toll Parliament the amount spent in unauthorised expenditure during the past year. The revenue derive! from the sale of consols is also a State secret, and the abstract of revenue and expenditure, which should have been published in the Gazette early in May, is not yet forthcoming. All these matters are, perhaps, looked upon by the New Liberal Party as relics of barbarisms, and having got New Zealand into their hands, and nobody to stop them in their onward career, the Party can afford to throw our worn out constitution to the winds. Some people say that these experiments are dangerous, and that the Liberals will rue them bitterly. Never rmnd the croakers’ cry the the N.Z. Times, and the Seddonites, and the Wardites. So long as we have a majority behind us the constitution may , go to blazes. When our forefathers feltaggrieved at Charles I. inflicting taxes arid spending the proceeds without the sanction of Parliament, members first expostulated with him, and that mild course failing, they deprived him of his head and crown. Since then Parliament has been the guardian of the public purse. Occasionally English Ministers withhold the details of the expenditure of secret service money, but in New Zealand we have neither Fenians to watch, nor foreign spies to keep in check, and the refusal oi Mr Seddon to disclose to Parliament what ho and his colleagues have done with thf colony’s revenue looks very much as ii there was a very ugly skeleton in the Cabinet. The Premier’s lofty bluff in saying in quite an airy style that “hr would take the sole responsibility of it,’’ may look heroic to his worshippers, but it is not for that sort of thing that he is Premier. Members who are not entirely destitute of the ability to think for them selves, and many of whom belong to the Liberal Party, are asking Ministers and each other why they are not taken into the

CONFIDENCE OF MINISTERS,

They are becoming fractious, and show signs of breaking away fiom the boasted majority and say, “We are mere duiu* mies; Government tells so much that is not true, and we have no means of findingout what is true, that our positions have become irksome and ridiculous.” Out member summed up bis views of the pre sent state of things thus in the lobby to» day : “ I look upon the colony as if it were a joint stock company, the electors being the shareholders, Parliament the directors and the Cabinet the administrative staff. We have competent accountants and auditors, and at our annual meeting we look for a properly audited balauce'-siieet to be laid before up when vve meet. It any company found itself in the position we are in, I reckon our Chairman of Directors would find himself in a tight place. Suppose the case of a woollen factory, and we asked for information as to what had been paid for wool, and the chairman refused to say, but replied, as the Premier did about our returns, “I lake the sole responsibility of withholding this information,” why, he would not be supported by a single vote. The fact iwo have a lot of members who are not possessed of the capacity to judge between right and wrong, and who would vote with the present Govenment if it brought in a bill asserting that the earth was stationery and the sun moved around it.” July 9th, 1895.