The Dominion. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1912. A USEFUL EXPOSURE.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1558, 30 September 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1912. A USEFUL EXPOSURE.

."We print to-day a fuller report than time or space allowed in our Saturday issue of that remarkable debate upon the Spoils Government's administration of the State Guaranteed Advances Act which Mr. G. W. Russell precipitated on Saturday morning—so unwisely, from his point of view, but so usefully, from the point of view of the public. The crushing, exposure which the member for Avon brought upon himself and his political allies was a proper punishment for the cynical impudence of his initial action. Under the Ward Administration the State Advances Office went so far beyond the boundaries of' common prudence, and transgressed so violently the spirit of the Act, in its anxiety to make the Department an electioneering weapon, that it had to limit to £5000 the sum the Department could lend to a county under the Act. Well aware that the party ho belongs _ to had practically exhausted the visible resources of tho Department for the time being, the member for Avon, indifferent to the financial duty of the Government to the country, and anxious only to embarrass the Government if he could, actually moved to reduce a vote for which as a member of the Mackenzie Government he was partially responsible, as an indication that the £5000 limit referred to should be removed. Impudence could no further go; but it had a swift punishment in the most crushing indictment, possible of the party with which Mr. Russell is associated. _ In a speech of singular effectiveness—which Mr. Massby was quite right in saying should be in the hands of every elector—the Minister for Finance so fully exposed the reckless, unjust, unpatriotic, and improvident methods of the Spoils party that he left Mn. "Russell silent and disorganised, deserted by his party, and iricnpahlu of asking for a division on his motion. When Mr. Allen took ollice with the new Government he found that the old ~Govßvnm?nt had presented him with

liabilities amounting to over £600,000—"not a very nice heritage," as i, the Minister said. That was bad 1 enough. But there was more to 8 come. Whatever the Stats Guaranteed Advances Office was established for, it was certainly not established •is a feather-bed for fat boroughs. I liad it been so represented, even the ' rank and file of the Spoils party • would have risen in rebellion against their leaders, and demanded that in its scheme of lending money to public bodies the. State should give first consideration to neediness and helpt jcssness—to the counties and the e, buck-blocks generally. Yet of the £2,000,000 odd of loans to which the State was committed by the old parly between the passing of the Act and tho advent of the new Government, over £1,000,000 was provided for boroughs, and only about two-thirds that sum for the county councils. _ But the maladministration of the old Government did not stop, even here—it.is a ease, of Ossa on Pelion, and Olympus piled above both. For the allocation of the vast total of loans to the boroughs was made worse by the unpleasant suspicion it raised of being based upon party considerations. The country will re-echo from end to end the surprise and indignation with which the House received the details of the loans to boroughs read out by the Minister. Wherever it seemed desirable, during 1911, to use the Advances Department to sweeten an electorate, the Government appears to have opened the purse- . strings. Money was thrown at Timaru, at Blenheim, at Wanganui, the boroughs of Parncll, of Greyrnoulh, of Miramar, and of Hastings. Even the small proportion allotted to the counties was apparently allotted with an eye to the fact that an election was to take place in December. It is a shameful story of what_ a self-seeking and unpatriotic political group can do with the nation's resources when the party case is desperate. There is not much need nowadays, in the presence of the ruin and disintegration of tho old Spoils party, to do more than record the Minister's indictment upon, this point. But what will bear emphasis is the fact that the Advances Act has been so ill-worked. By so much as it has been, as wo have called it, a feather-bed for fat boroughs, it has been a stone around the neck of the starved back-blocks. The, back-blocks must bear their full share in sustaining the nation's credit and in paying tho bill; but they have had to stand aside and see others gather most of the fruit. And the process by which this injustice has been strenuously worked has hampered tho financing of the nation. The back-blocks must continue to suffer somewhat for a time for the sins of the Government that robbed them. There is something almost sublime in the spectacle of the leader—or one of the leaders— of tho party which worked the wrong presuming to censure the new Government tor not doing, with an almost empty purse, what the old party could not do while it was emptying tho purse. Supposing a man, holding the purse-strings, reduced his estate almost to nothing by gambling and other excesses, and supposing that he was somehow made to hand over control to his wife, what could be said of him if he upbraided her because she did not at once provide a more handsome table and a more comfortable home than he could : do in his most expansive mood? We trust that 'the"matter will be raised ■ again by the Government, as is promised, and that the . member for 1 Avon will have as much, reason to i regret, as the public will have to feel ■ glad, that his mistaken notion of tactics has brought about his cars and the cars of his associates the ruins of the old Spoils party. '