NEW ZEALAND’S REVENUE.

White Ribbon, Volume 32, Issue 380, 18 March 1927, Page 12

NEW ZEALAND’S REVENUE.

(Contributed.) What is revenue? It is the annual income of our Government, made up of taxes, custom and excise duties, and lined for our country’s expenses. For instance, each penny stamp we use, is a payment of revenue. We pay a small amount for a moneyorder or postal-note, and this is for revenue. The total Post and Telegraph revenue in New Zealand last year was £3,100,396 10s. 10d., and at the same time we were all most usefully served and benefltted. Other sources of revenue are the railways, and the duty on imported goods such as cars, foodstuffs, clothing, machinery, and alcoholic liquor. In 1924, the duty on alcoholic liquor was £1,826,839. It is natural for people to sav: “In these hard times, how can our coun-

try go on without the revenue from alcohol?” Do they realise that it is coming out of their own pockets, and that they are paying for something that does them no good? Those of the public who drink, pay the drink revenue. The liquor seller simply adds it to the price of the drink, and makes a profit on the whole cost; those who take no drink pay no liquor revenue. hast year, the people of New Zealand spent over 8J million pounds on strong drink. The revenue from this was less than £2,000,000. If the amount spent in liquor were spent in other wiser channels, the result would be a great increase in general prosperity. Such prosperity would, in the end, provide far more revenue to the Government than the liquor traffic now does! You wonder if that can be so! Think of what the Government has to keep up as the result of the drinking: a larger number of police l , magistrates, judges, prisons and reformatories, to say nothing of the extra cost of hospitals and asylums, due to the indulgence in alcohol. These require an upkeep that uses a large share of the revenue, and that is without reckoning the cost in e fficiency in the drinker, and in unhappiness,' anxiety and suffering, sapping the lives of the women and children dependent on these drinkers.