The Press Tuesday, March 15, 1932. Motor Taxation.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20496, 15 March 1932, Page 8

The Press Tuesday, March 15, 1932. Motor Taxation.

If the Report of the National Expenditure Commission had spared motorists, this would have been more surprising than the severity of the blow aimed at them in the recommendations, and probably they did not expect to be spared. But in the few paragraphs devoted to the question the Commission ignores so much and assumes so much and urges so much, to the detriment of motorists, that their protest, which has already begun, is bound to be strongly sustained. If the Commissioners have struck unfairly hard where the wood seemed to be soft, the fault is not wholly theirs, because the Government gave them some very bad precedents. Not only that, it allowed its pledge of a thorough investigation of highways finance to issue in a scrambled report at the close of last session, useful neither then nor now. Before that, the motorists . had suffered the following losses: they had been obliged to pay interest on £1,250,000 of loan money, previously paid by the Consolidated Fund; the Public Works subsidy of £200,000, paid in respect of obligations taken over from the Department, had been discontinued; the annual grant of £35,000 from the Consolidated Fund had been discontinued; the annual roading subsidy of £220,000, payable to local bodies, had been made payable by the Highways Fund; quarter of a million pounds had been diverted from the same source to the relief of rural rates; and when petrol tax was raised from 6d to 8d the increase was treated as ordinary Customs revenue. Some of these facts, of course, show that the motorist has already suffered shabby treatment in the breaking of the quite clear understanding upon which special burdens of taxation were assumed. Others show, moreover, that the Commissioners convey a quite false impression when they say that they " cannot "accept the view that motor taxation "should be wholly spent on loading "schemes, irrespective of the amount "of general taxation available for " other services." The whole is not so spent and never was. Even before the Act was amended in the directions indicated above, motor taxation poured one very large strr.nm of revenue into the Consolidated Fund—the duties on motor vehicles and parts, which amounted to a million and a third in 1929-30; and the proportion of motor taxation which the Highways Board can Spend on construction and maintenance is now less than ever. If the Commission's recommendations are accepted, it . will r be further reduced, because the building, of new roads will cease and maintenance be reduced to what is " essential "—and by that the Commission means reduction to a lower standard, while the saving, estimated to be "at least £500,000 per annum," is of course to be "made available . . . to "assist towards Budget equilibrium." In our first comment on the Report we drew attention to the unfairness of this proposal, to cut down to bare bones the expenditure on purposes for which special taxation was accepted and levied and seize the surplus for other purposes. It is unfair, apart from the wider breach of an already broken contract, because no allowance is made for the motor-taxpayer's present contributions to the relief of the Budget and because no attempt is made toi estimate their limit. The Commission has seen a rich booty and hastened to lift it. But instead of saying any more on that head we may point to the danger, first of reducing the Main Highways Board to impotence, second of false economy in maintenance. It will not perhaps be very warmly maintained that the dominion should push .on with new construction, though the motorists may, and will, say that if it should not, they ought to pay less in taxation. It may also bo true that something can be saved on maintenance without risk of worse maintenance, though this is certainly a question for experts, not for politicians. But it is very dangerous to decide iti advance, even with a " possibly" to edge the decision in, that " the present high standard of main- <£ tenance could be 11 lowered without "detriment," since roads are either well maintained or they are not. The country cannot afford to let its roads go back, least of all in the belief, which the Commission very nearly if not quite betrays, that what is lost there may be picked up by the railways. The Government will put itself hopelessly in the wrong if ij; is more «ager to grab the motorists' money than to hear their case and treat them justly.