DUNEDIN STAR.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XII, Issue 4199, 26 January 1885, Page 2

DUNEDIN STAR.

The speech is hardly satisfactory. He should not have spoken until he had something more definite to say. He expressed himself throughout as under a constraint not wholly accounted for by his evident physical weakness. The speech confirms the opinion that the Ministerial mind is not made up on important questions of policy. The outline of the government scheme is of the shadowiest description, • with not one word as to the ways and means. We presume the intention is that instead of the House appropriating moneys for particular works, hospitals, and charitable aid, a lump sim should be appropriated annually. We cannot see how this arrangement will mend matters. The handing over of expenditure to a congress of county chairmen, mayors, and road board chairmen, is simply preposterous. What a nice little nest of log-rollers such a congress would be. The Premier had better kept;

silent, or gone further into particulars. As sketched, the scheme is impracticable, ;ind, if practicable, utterly profitless. A sort of bastard provincialism, it appears, is contemplated, with all the evils and tendency to corrupt administration which characterised that system, without any of its advantages. The colony is already suffering from a plethora of local bodies, which in many instances might be advantageously amalgamated.