N.S.W. FINANCES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1712, 15 May 1917, Page 4

N.S.W. FINANCES.

MR. HOLMAN’S MISSION. The State Premier and Treasurer, Mr Holman,, has sailed for Europe, and no one acquainted with the position of the finances of New South Wales will envy him his mission. The financial position of New South Wales so far as it can be ascertained from a jumbled mass of confused accounts, is enough to take all the pleasure out of the London trip of even so persistent an optimist as Mr Holman. At the end of 1916, Mr Holman claimed a surplus for the year of £150,000. No one knows where he got it from. Everyone who essays the forbidding task of analysing the State’s accounts gets a different result; but all —except Mr Holman —are agreed on producing a substantial deficit. One “authority” who is entitled to be taken seriously has traced the State’s monthly debit balance from the end of July, 1916, to 31st March, 1917, and he says that at the end of July the debt was £6,490,000, and at the end of March it had increased to £B,642,000. The Government, he says, endeavours to offset this by showing credits in trust accounts totalling £6,323,000, but the critic declares —and quotes the AuditorGeneral’s recent caustic 1 report to prove it —that the Government has already misused the bulk of these trust funds, and the a ('counts are really not in credit at all. He declares that, while in some circumstances the Government might be entitled to use this money to avoid raising expensive loans, such action is not justified now, when the Treasurer his “used his last line of defence” and “placed the State in a perilous position.”