The Press Wednesday, November 2, 1927. The Petrol Tax.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19147, 2 November 1927, Page 8

The Press Wednesday, November 2, 1927. The Petrol Tax.

Every user of a motor vehicle must have received a shock yesterday morning when he read that the Government had suddenly imposed a tax on petrol which \pll bring in £720,000 a year. The tax, of fourpence a gallon, is about 20 per cent, of the present price of petrol, and it will amount to a new tax of £5 or £6 on each owner of a motor-car. One must assume that the Government has not acted without giving the question careful attention, and one must recognise that a petrol tax is a fairly reasonable method of raising money for the maintenance of the roads. No single tax is quite equitable, whether it is a tax on the vehicle, on the tyres, or on the motor spirit, and perhaps there is no combination of all three against which objections may not be urged. In itself, as we have said, a tax on motor spirit, which is, roughly, a tax on the use that is made of the roads, is not unreasonable. The Government can in any case say that motorists' organisations have admitted that better roads will reduce the cost of maintaining cars, and that the petrol tax will in the end leave the owners of motor vehicles better off than they are. But it is not apparent that the Government requires so large a sum as £720,000 a year to supplement the existing sources of revenue required for the construction and maintenance of highways. It is all very well to say that the country will receive value for the tax, but this is always said of every tax. The fact remains that the State proposes to increase by nearly threequarters of a million sterling the levy that it has been making upon the purses of the people, and the truth remains that the less the Government extracts from the public the better. Taxation for necessary public services is, of course, different from taxation for the financing of unproductive or doubtfully productive undertakings. The present, however, is a time in which any avoidable increase- in taxation, for any purpose whatever, ought to be avoided. The users of motor vehicles will expect the Government to show clearly that the money- which it is now proposed to raise will actually be required for current expenditure. If it is so required, in addition to the existing taxes, then one may wonder, with some of those members who spoke on the proposal on Monday night, whether the ■ Government is not going too far and too fast in its road policy.

The Public Trust Office. The other day the. President of the Associated Chambers of Commerce, in a reference to the Public Trust Office, happened to make the mistake of saying that the Office does, not pay incometax. The Office was prompt in circulating a correction through the Press Association. It was quite entitled to do this,, but whether it was discreet in doing it is questionable. For this is the first time, so far as we are aware, the Office has Had an opportunity to correct a criticism of-it, and its haste to do so emphasises very strongly its inability to find anything to say in reply to the much more serious criticisms of its policy which have appeared in our own columns. For it is made evident that if there is any adverse criticism which it can answer, it will answer it; and the fact that it has not answered the criticisms in The Press means that it cannot do so. The Office has certainly prepared from time to time and issued rambling and evasive and very cautious official defences, none of which met the case against it, and last week it had the advantage of a long defence printed in the Maoriland Worker. We mention the Maoriland Worker because the thick-and-thin defender of the Public Trust Office as it is to-day must in the nature of things be an admirer of swollen bureaucratic establishments. To nearly, all sensible men, however, the vigorous and even violent support of the organ of the Reds Trill seem to be much less important, and much less significant, than the doubt and disapproval of such a gathering as the conference of Chambers of Commerce. Readers of The Press are familiar with the main features of the case against the Office: its gradual trespass, through the carelessness of our legislators, beyond the original boundaries of its purpose, its acquisition of powers repugnant to trustee law, its authority to make immense profits for its own aggrandisement out of" the estates and funds committed to its charge,'its unfair competition with legitimate businesses, and its refusal to give those particulars of its finances which are given as a matter of course by other public Departments. These matters were mentioned at the I conference of Chambers of Commerce as peculiarly illustrative of the bureaucratic danger which was being condemned, and although one speaker* who has probably not paid any attention to the working of the Office, seemed to be a little shocked that it should be " singled out" for criticism, the general feeling of the conference was that there should be no qualification in its condemnation of the bureaucratic evils of which the. Office is so conspicuous an example. The Public Trustee, in one of his statements, was foolish enough to suggest that the Office's critics were not disinterested. He may still feel disposed to say this even of the criticism endorsed by the Chambers of Commerce, but the Minister in Charge, who happens to be Mr Coates himself, will perhaps begin to take a different view.

A Ministry for Transport. The conference of Chambers of Commerce acted wisely on Monday in refusing, at this early stage, to pass a resolution condemning the proposal to set up a Ministry for Transport. Until the Government's plans are actually known it is sufficient to be on guard against a further extension, without the most pressing need, of the Public Service, and it is not guite certain at

present that the Government has reached the stage of having plans. The first reference to the subject was the Prime Minister's announcement in the Railways Statement that he had " come to the conclusion, after carefully weighing the whole of the cir- " cumstanceß surrounding the Do- " minion's transport problems, that if "we are to secure for the country a "continuation of the liberal develop"ment and protective policy that has "been so valuable in the past, it will "be necessary to inaugurate transport "control through a properly consti- " tuted Ministry of Transport." Less than a week later, during a discussion on the Estimates, Mr Coates gave some particulars of the work that such a Ministry might be expected to do, explained how it functioned in "some "other countries," and concluded with a further expression of his opinion I that the Government " must have some "means by which it could co-ordinate "traffic so that this huge publicly- " owned concern might give a full re"turn for its cost." But everything that has been said about the proposal since that date has been said by people who have had no further means of knowing what the Government actually intends to do. It has been assumed—not altogether without cause, since there were some suspicious phrases in other parts of the Statement —that one object of the change is to protect the railways against the competition of the roads, and against this danger, as against the more general one of a further growth of bureaucracy, the " Parliament of Commerce" should certainly be on its guard. But it must also be realised that the Government can hardly be so foolish as to be thinking of repeating the blunder over railway transport that it made so short a time ago under pressure from the local bodies controlling transport by trams. There is a case, and a very strong case, for a comprehensive enquiry into transport problems by an impartial Board of some kind, and if the proposed Ministry for Transport could be kept free of the evils that so soon beset Government Departments, it might be cheaper to establish it than to blunder on in the dark.