The Fielding Star. Pubnlished Daily. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1894. GOVERNMENT FINANCING.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 285, 11 April 1894, Page 2

The Fielding Star. Pubnlished Daily. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1894. GOVERNMENT FINANCING.

Although the members of the Government are continually boasting that they are carrying on the affairs of the Colony by a self-reliant and non-bor-rowing policy, yet they are raising money by the process of the conversion of loans, and, as our contemporary the Post puts it, surreptitiously increasing the burden on posterity without the present generation doing anything which may help posterity to bear such burden. We are informed that the result of the loan conversions will be to release something like £'300,000 of necrued savings in sinking funds, which will then be available for current use. When all the loans are converted and all the sinking fund accumulations absorbed, the colony will be left with an immensely increased national debt, which will present a very serious obstacle to any further direct attempt at borrowing, however urgent the need for it ma}' be. The operations now in progress will add very nearly half a million to the net debt. The present system is one of the worst possible systems of borrowing. It is borrowing on the sly, with really nothing to show for the liability incurred. Yet its authors have the impudence to assert that the colony is living within its means, and is pursuing a self-reliant policy, when it is giving enormous drafts on the future, in order to be permitted to use for present necessities thfi accumulated savings of former years and of a more prudent policy. Assuming that these figures are correct, and that the Treasurer will be able ro show a surplus of £200,000 on the transactions of the last financial year, the Government will have a sum of £500,000 with which to commence the financial year 1894-5- In such ease surely it is not too much to ask that the burdens of taxation, which are now crushing the people to the earth, be lessened in some degree by reductions in the Customs tariff. Although the affairs of the colony are apparently in a prosperous condition through the frozen meat and the butter industries, yet we can not ignore the too patent fact that money is scarce, and that thousands of industrious men are either out of employment, or are keeping" body and soul together on starvation wages. What prosperity there is may be called local ; certainly it is not general, or shared by a multitude of wouldbe workers. That the pinch will be severely felt during the winter now close at hand, is prognosticated on all sides, and no better evidence of the truth of this can be obtained than the fact of the daily increasing number of " swaggers " who are wandering over the North Island in search of a means of living. Already they have become a burden on the farmers and settlers, and |ultimately they must become a charge to the Government, either by work being found for them, or by the establishment of soup kitchens or Other similar means of keeping them alive. We believe if the Ministers changed their tactics of aggression and thereby allowed capital to regain confidence, enterprise would be excited and abundant work found in new industries capable of absorbing all classes- or labor, and the desired end obtained ot revolutionising the present condition of the working classes, withthe expenditure of one penny drawn from the people as a whole by taxation. k