Free Trade

Feilding Star, Volume VI, Issue 144, 21 May 1885, Page 3

Free Trade

The Minister of Justice and Education, in off eriug himself for election to the Legislative Council of New South Wales, has just made a Ministerial declaration on this question, which commauds our highest respect. We do not often meet with such plain speaking as is contained in the following passage extracted verbatim from his speech. : — I come now to the question of Free Trade and Protection. We have been requested by a body of gentlemen in Adelaide to introduce a tariff in which very high and valorem rates of duty— up to 20 per cent. — shall be imposed. Well, I will say at once the Government are not going to introduce any such tariff. (Cheers.) There are two lines on which a tariff can be formed. Every tariff is a tax on the people, and you must impose taxes for one of two reasons. The Free Trade idea is that all taxes which the people pay should go to the funds of the Government, in order to be devoted to the only legitimate purpose to which taxes should be devoted — the government of the country and the protection of life and property. The protection theory is that you should impose taxes on the consumers as a whole, in order that certain classes should be benefited. That appears to me not a legitimate mode of imposing taxes. I need hardly say the Government intend to introduce a new tariff. (Hear, hear.) That tariff will be founded on the first of these principle!.