LOCAL BODY REQUESTS.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18412, 19 June 1925, Page 10

LOCAL BODY REQUESTS.

■' —__ +: DEPUTATION TO MINISTER. (FBXSS ASSOCIATION TULEOBJUI.) . WELLINGTON, June 18. The principal, remits .passed by the recent Municipal Conference were laid before the Hon. R. F. Bollard by a deputation consisting of the Mayors of "Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, Masterton, Newmarket, Palnierston North, Nelson end Invercargill. The deputation laid ' stress on the remits asking the Government: ' (a) To increase its contributions to Fire -Boards. ■ (b) To allow the expenses of local body.loans to be paid.out of loan. (c) To enable absent voters to vote at local elections, as they do at Parliamentary elections. (d) To. empower the Main Highway Board to subsidise large boroughs and cities.

(e) To allow boroughs representation on the Main Highways Board. IT) To increase to £3O the araouut which a local body member may sell to a local body. , ; (g) To legislate to provide that all a local body's banking accounts bo treated as one account. It .was also urged that soldier settlers' land which bad reverted to the Crown ought uot to bo exempt from rates. TKp Minister: Do you expect the Government to pass that? (Laughter.) The Minister promised to give careful consideration to all the remits.

Interest in Mr Winston Churchill's first Budget naturally sent thought back .to his father's famous "Budget than never was born." Though he joked with Treasury officials on his inability to "understand those damn dots," as he termed decimals, Lord Bandolph Churchill took hia duties very seriously, and his Budget was to have been an attempt at a financial revolution, regrading and readjusting almost every tax then in force. Perhaps the most interesting of his proposals, from the present point of view, was the lowering of the income-tax.