NOTES OF THE DAY.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1369, 21 February 1912, Page 4

NOTES OF THE DAY.

The "memorandum" on finance submitted by the Prime Minister to the House yesterday is practically a Budget. But it is very different from the bewildering Budget of 1911, which the Government compiled in such a flurry of anxiety that it made some silly blunders in facts and figures—blunders that had to be corrected after the Budget had been delivered. • Tho "memorandum" is a very subdued seriuel to, and.continuation of, the frantic electioneering statement of last year. Yet we are very far from quarrelling with it on that account. Indeed, we feel we ought to say that the memorandum is upon the whole correct in tone and apparently generally reliable as to the ■figures. It is estimated that the revenue will show an increase of £726,055 on the 1910-11 figures, and that the expenditure will show an crease of £996,749. In about one year, if the "Liberals" stayed in office, the deficits would at this rate begin. This Government that piles up the expenditure a quarter of a million a year faster than the revenue comes in, and that raises the expenditure by just under a million sterling is the Government that three years ago was pretending to retrench. There is not much to be said to-day about the memorandum, but a word is necessary upon the fignrcs relating to public works expenditure. In one of the tables it is presented that the expenditure for tho ten months ended January 31 was £1,452,647, and that the expenditure for the whole financial year will be £'2,118,717. No doubt it will actually turn out at less than two millions. Now, for electioneering purposes, the Government so multiplied its roads-and-bridges pro- 1 mises that it got the House to vote £3,040,643 for public works. It promised an expenditure of three millions; it never intended to keep its promise; it was aiming for votes, and hoped to gull the public—but its false pretences were unsuccessful. The public will do well to note that the Government's false pretences in this quarter amounted to a million sterling—a million's worth of unfulfilled promises, a million's worth of unpaid bribes.

It is very amusing to hear our "Liberal" friends hastily admitting what hitherto they have always denied, that the Legislative Council must be reformed, lock, stock, and barrel. Three of their nominees in the Legislative Council admitted the need for reform quite frankly: the nominative system, they said, was doomed. The suddenness of this conversion is very suspicious—more than merely suspicious. Nobody will doubt that if the Government had managed to obtain a majority at the polls, it would have been shouting out angry things at the suggestion that the nominative system should be touched But even in its alarm and anxiety the Government cannot be candid. Its suggestion is that the Council should consist of forty-eight members, twenty-four to be elected by the House and twelve by Provincial Councils, the remaining twelve to be nominated by the Government of the day. The country will simply not accept this scheme at all. The nominative system must go, and the power of election must be placedih the hands of the people. The nublie has never been told why the Souse of Representatives should elect the Upper House, and it will not abandon its claim to the right of election without very strong and substantial reasons. The safest way of tlealine with what is admittedly a most difficult question in a country witli a democratic constitution is to leave the election of the Council to lhe people themselves. The Federal Senate, is a standing refutation of the hollow plea that the people cannot give effect to its opinion under the elective system.

Al.TliniT.H jt- is hardly necessary to r)if.nj?s l]ir CJnVni-nnr'i? Sjv?nrh, ivj-,ir!.i even the Ministerial press has been

unable to approve of, it is perhaps worth while briefly noting the extravagant ideas put forward by the dying Government as to the land question. Nearly everyone is agreed I now in opposing the aggregation of land suitable for occupation in small areas, but there is a right and it wrong way of dealing with the matter. The "Liberals" choose the wrong way; they turned, not for the first time, in the direction of confiscation. For the taint of confiscation resides in the proposal 1 hat, in cases of compulsory purchase, the owner will have to takejust what is given him, without having any right of appeal, or any guarantee that he will not be robbed later on. He has to surrender his property, take the price flung at him, and run the risk of having to pay part of it back if in operating the land subsequently the Government drops any money. This is sheer theft. And if the destruction of private right in property is theft, then it is theft to ''forfeit all land which has been aggregated in breach of the law." No sane or honest Government would dream of making such a proposal; it will make responsible people morc_ than ever anxious to end an Administration that so seriously menaces the safety and stability of the country. In the Legislative Council yesterday the Hon. J. B. Callan said that in his opinion the owner of an estate taken compulsorily "should have a voice in the fixing of the price." Could there be any stronger commentary on the wreck that "Liberalism" has made of sound principles than the fact that such aelementary rule of honesty should require to be defended against an unscrupulous Government 1