The Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. Thursday, November 13, 1879.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 949, 13 November 1879, Page 2

The Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. Thursday, November 13, 1879.

Major Atkinson has now made it clear beyond all doubt or cavil, that there is a deficit of nine hundred thousand pounds attached to last year's receipts and expenditure, and the only way he tells us this can be made good is by increased taxation. This, at a time of such universal depression, not only throughout New Zealand, but the whole of the Australian Colonies, is a matter for very serious reflection. If property be taxed, as invitably it must, then will the working classes suffer with all others ; and at a time when they are least able to bear it, for hundreds if not thousands of men now in Now Zealand are wanting employment, where there is little prospect or likelihood of any large increased demand for labor. If the land and property owners be taxed heavily, they will naturally seek to make good the burdens to be imposed on them by reducing expenditure in the shape of employing fewer hands on their farms, sheep, and cattle runs. Building operations, to a great extent, will be suspended, and unless the five million loan be floated, which is doubtful, large numbers of toilers will have to be taken off the roads. As has been truly said by a contemporary, the abolition of the duties on flour and timber gave the poor man neither a cheap loaf nor a low rental. What is more it did not even give him better bread. The reduction of the duties on tea and sugar was so small that the benefit never reached the consumer. The importer and the retail dealer, probably, shared the profit between them ; so that had it not been for the self-laudation of the late Government party very few would have known that there had been any alteration of the tariff. Nevertheless we are prepared to admit that the reduction of the duties on the necessaries of life was a step in the right direction, and, it is a very great pity that, owing to the reckless and extravagance of the late administration of the Government cannot see their way to a still further reduction of those duties. The slight reduction that had been effected was of no real value to the people, so that if no material benefit can be granted, it is a matter of no importance to consumers, whether those duties are reimposed. In the course of a day or two we shall doubtless be able to place before our readers the Financial Statement of the C olonial Treasurer, when the precise state of our financial condition will be known, and the proposed means for carrying on the machinery of the Government ascertained. Already it has been

given us to understand that increased taxation must be imposed, and it is thought that this will include the restoration of the tariff as it stood before Mr. Ballance tinkered with it. A property and income tax is also spoken of, and to this, we imagine no valid objections will be raised. It is the only tax that will reach a large and wealthy class whose investments are much more profi table than if they had been made in land. Unpleasant as it always is, to contemplate the imposition of increased taxation, it is one of those evils that must inevitably result to a country that has persistently lived beyond its means. It has now become a recognised axiom in connection with the Government of this colony, that to live we must borrow. The ordinary revenue of the country is altogether inadequate to meet the demands upon it, and to draw upon otir resources to the utmost is the only resort if the continuation of the public works policy is to be a feature in our progress. We do not care to anticipate the consequences, should the raising of a new loan fail us. It has always some way or other proved the case in New Zealand, as in other colonies, that when they have been in extremity, something has turned up which restored former prosperity. It has either been new rich gold fields, or other discovery of valuable minerals, or new and profitable enterprises. Misfortunes and failures with countries as with people are not always unmitigated evils. We learn by the past how we should guide ourselves iu the future, and wo also learn what are the inevitable consequences of a country, like to an individual, living beyond its means. For the distant future in such a colony as New Zealand, we have nothing to fear, it is the immediate future that has to be looked to and considered ; and it not enough for us to say sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.