THE DEMOCRAT “BUDGET.”

Taranaki Daily News, 25 November 1935, Page 4

THE DEMOCRAT “BUDGET.”

Those who expected to find in Friday’s address of the leader of the Democrat Party, Mr. T. C. A. Hislop, the information he had promised a New Plymouth audience earlier in the week must have been grievously disappointed. Mr. Hislop said at New Plymouth that he was making public on Friday a statement showing how the Democrat programme would be financed and its promise kept to reduce taxation and to pay subsidies to farmers in lieu of the high exchange. The figures published are very far from supplying this information. They do not, for instance, contain any provision for the payment to the Maori race of the amounts recommended by various commissions of inquiry. Nor does the Democrat “budget” show how the restoration of the civil service superannuation funds to solvency is to be brought about. Yet to do so will cost some millions of pounds, and the promise to bring about the solvency of the funds was definite. Expenditure by a Democrat Ministry is to be reduced “by carrying out certain of the recommendations of the National Expenditure Commission.” Civil servants should be interested in this somewhat evasive allusion to recommendations that would entail a drastic reduction in their number, but they may take heart of grace by remembering that the Democrat Party has promised to increase expenditure on social services, although in this regard also its “budget” is illusory and evasive. The commission raised the question whether the Dominion was not spending more than it could afford upon social services and upon administrative costs. Many electors believe there is room for a reduction of expenditure in regard to both, but before supporting such a policy they have a right to know what are the services to be contracted, and upon whom the sacrifices entailed by a reduction of administrative costs will fall. Mr. Hislop’s “financial statement” is difficult to treat seriously. It is. a further instance of the ease with which eloquence can be applied to criticism, but how much more difficult it is to substitute a practicable programme of government that will show an improvement on the one criticised.