PROGRESSING BACKWARDS.

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 6, 11 October 1919, Page 3

PROGRESSING BACKWARDS.

Wheel and "Whoa!"

WHAT is usually referred to by the portly person with the legislative punch as "the incidence of taxation" is an engine levelled by the said portly person at the person least able to pay. In reality the imposition of a special tax on anybody least able to pay is an invitation to him to avoid using those services or goods on which the tax is levied. It is remembered with the necessary venom, that early in our grandfathers' lives stertorous politicians desiring to find money for special purposes exploited new means for raising it and among other things declared that the people of Englandwere getting too much light and air. They therefore imposed a "window tax" which made it-nearly impossible for people to sit at table :without candles—-and in England now, there are houses innumerable which demonstrate this absurd law by having all bxit the absolutely essential

windows walled in. That is to say it was then cheaper to build walls than to use the light of heaven.

At the same time in France the poorest of workers—women and men whose average wage was four and ahalf francs a week—were subjected to a "ground" tax, extra to the rent paid- to- the landlord, and payable to the State, which tax was leviable should the-peasant be unable to pay, on his wretched goods .by "distrain." In Germany, Austria, and other countries the common people were harassed by similar "hunger tax laws," and in all ages among all people the "motion" of some wretched national or local politician has created untold misery by carrying disastrous measures aimed at the people.

In modern times one may take the case of the ininquitous "hut-tax" imposed by Natal on the natives, and which.was enforced by machine guns and "Mark four" bullets, and in which the natives were mown down in hordes without any appreciable casualties among the "law and order" persons, the whole point being that at some meeting somewhere a local or national politician with a swelled hoad had moved this iniquity and because it was passed was responsible for wholesale slaughter. A journalist of the time sent to a Capetown paper these words "Nightly the native, women ar - e mourning for their dead."

There has, within the memory of middle-aged New Zealanders been a similar attempt to enforce among the Maoris an almost identical diabolism, in the course of which armed parties were despatched to bring the natives to a sense of "reason." There were happily no casualties except that of an exuberant volunteer who tripped over his rifle and a sup-ple-jack, and sprained his ankle, for which one hopes he is still drawing a pension from his grateful country. Not of course that he, or any of them knew why the slaughter was to be accomplished any more than the New Zealand Police knew why they were .sent to shoot «up Kua and his followers.

These slight reminders bring one up to date, and to the extraordinary mid-Vietorianism of the Taranaki County Council, which threatened to impose a "wheel-tax," possibly on the grounds that wheels are a menace to civilisation, and roads a thing to be discouraged. If Tarannki,which possesses land selling at a higher price per acre than any land in New Zealand expects to keep its roads in order by means of a tax on wheels then other counties might with equal injustice place a tax on perambulators or milking machines, ploughs, reapers and harrows. The point is that the road from New Plymouth to Waitara or from old anything to New Anywhere Else is no more a local matter than is the education of New Zealand children.

Taranaki stuck to the ancient form of turnpike tax long enough without the excuse of old countries whose roads were national, and the only traffic highways in pre-locomotive days. The roads of Taranaki are as imich the concern of Hawke's Bay as the roads of Canterbury are the concern of Otago, (the roads of Auckland incidentally being nobody's business). If the State which can slop millions of money about in unproductive works can't nationalise roads and make absurdities like wheel tax or pike tax unnecessary, it's a pretty poor affair. Local bodies throughout New Zealand are always handicapped for lack of funds with which to build real roads,, but no return to eighteenth century.methods of taxation is us the re. quisite By the way. it \\o€:ldl>e deeply interesting to hear fronj the ruling Government what its road policy really is— or if it has a road policy.