3

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complete in itself, our receipts did not come up to our expenditure by £248,668. I hope honorable gentlemen will bear these facts in mind, because they will then be able better to understand the figures I am going to submit for this year. I should point out here that this deficit of £131,824 may be said to be fairly reducible by £50,000 of land-tax, which the late Colonial Treasurer estimated to obtain during the last year, but which was not collected; of course, if I were to take it off there, I should not be able to count it as revenue for the present year, and, as it is revenue for the present year, I have treated it in that way. I wish to call the attention of the House to the fact, because, when these estimates were made, it was calculated that this £50,000 from the land-tax would come in as revenue, and would therefore have reduced the deficit to that extent. I should like now, Sir, to refer to one or two questions of general expenditure, and my object in doing so is to show that we are not exercising any economy whatever iu our public service. By that I mean that, although we have in this House made a great deal of talk about retrenchment —although Governments have been turned out because they Avere supposed to be extravagant, and others have come in pledging themselves to effect great reductions—the fact is, that we have not retrenched in any one respect that I can find out. I shall now read to the House certain returns which I have had prepared, in order that honorable members may see that such is the fact. Ido it because before I have sat down honorable members will see that we shall have to take some very vigorous steps in order to place the finance of the colony in that position in which it ought to be. Taking what I call the nine large departments—omitting such departments as Education, Railways, and Surveys, which could not be very well taken in, for obvious reasons, but including all the others —viz., Public Departments, Law and Justice. Postal and Telegraph, Customs, Marine, Native, Militia and Volunteers, Constabulary, and Public Domains and Buildings - I find that the amount voted by this House for these sendees for 1877-78 was £866,216. I find that the expenditure of that year on these departments was about £10,000 more than this House had voted: in other words, it was £876,397. The estimates for the same departments for 1878-79, as passed by this -House, amounted to £903,857 —a gradual increase, honorable gentlemen will observe, notwithstanding all our professions of economy; and they will not be gratified when I further tell them that the actual expenditure on these departments, instead of being £903,857, was, as a matter of fact, £953,671 for the last year. So much, then, for economy in these branches of the service where, if economy was to be effected at all, it ought to have been effected. In other words, the expenditure on these nine departments has risen from £866,216 in 1877-78, to £953,671 for the year which has just passed. And now, Sir, let us look at the Native Department. We shall find that this department in 1876-77 cost, including the Civil list, £34,124; in 1877-78 it cost £43,047; in 1878-79 it cost £58,336. So that all through the departments the increase has been —I can hardly say gradual —very considerable. In the second year the increase in the Native Department was apparently almost entirely for Native schools; and that, so far, is satisfactory: no one will begrudge that expenditure supposing the schools have been conducted properly, as to which it is not now my business to inquire. But tkere is also this significant fact, with