The Feilding Star. TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 1893. Victoria and New South Wales

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 110, 7 March 1893, Page 2

The Feilding Star. TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 1893. Victoria and New South Wales

Affaiks in Victoria at the present time do not look very promising. There were rumours in London Jast Friday that another Australian Bank was about to suspend payment, and on .Saturday the Economist (a recognised English financial paper) said the Victorian finances were m a dangerous state. Trust and loan funds were exhausted, the customs revenue was decreasing, and the Treasury had prostituted itself to the dense ignorance of of the grasping and selfish electors. The paper urges the colony to abandon the huge system of municipal bribery, postpone the issue of fresh loans, and make an effort to increase its exports. New South Wales is in ano better condition. In her article in the Times on that colony, Miss Shaw, who visited Australia some months ago in the interests of that journal, says that owing to the corporate Cabinet the sense of responsibility in the colony is too slight. The country is covered with superfluous and unproductive works, which were built out of public revenue. The Civil Service, which is encumbered with officials who are not required, needs reorganisation. Reform is also necessary in the system of national book-keeping, a change being vitally urgent in order to enable the Treasurer to control the expenditure. Commercial enterprise in the colony is now conducted under fluctuating political direction, and either a more autocratic Government or better method is required to put things in the colony on a more satisfactory footing. These rumours of new financial disasters in one colony, and statements of direct and wilful iuis-gavernment in another, must do much to injure the credit of Australia in the English money market ; and the only remedy appears to be that of rigid economy and selfdenial in administration of their revenues, and the limitation of the power of any political party to climb into power by pandering to the lowest passions of the thriftless and the unthinking.