WHAT CAN THE GOLDFIELDS GAIN BY THE COUNTY SYSTEM?

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 369, 31 March 1876, Page 3

WHAT CAN THE GOLDFIELDS GAIN BY THE COUNTY SYSTEM?

Will our contemporary of Clyde, or he of Tuapeka, give us a plain answer to the question we have placed at the head of this article? Our contemporaries employ writers, who should be able to give an intelligible answer for the faith they profess. Such a reasonable answer we have not yet had. Abuse of Provincial maladministration —-which we ourselves occasionally wash mildly in—is no sufficient reason to expect a gaia simply by a change of administrative form. Perhaps we shall be told the Goldfields will receive their own revenue for local expenditure. What if it can be shown that for years past the Goldfields have received more in amount than their own revenue from Provincial maladministration ? Mr. J. C, Brown's figures, in his carefully prepared speech against the Abolition Bill have not yet been proved false, although published in the ' Tuapeka Times.' The Goldfields of Otago, whatever may be the case in other Provinces, cannot be separated and declared to be Bimply for miners and. mining. The pastoral interest, even in Goldfields, is the greatest commercially. The mining interest is next in importance, with the agricultural close on its heels. There is no way yet propounded of returning Goldfields revenue for local expenditure, which would not place the benefit almost wholly in the. hands of the greater and lesser of the three interests._ A Goldfields County Board, once in the habit of spending mining revenue for roads and bridges, would never willingly forego a shilling it could raise.

While we wait to be instructed by our more farseeing contemporaries as to the era of bliss about to arise for G-oldfields, we may be allowed to count up the possible loss. First then—and perhaps the first conundrum-like includes our whole—all hope of reduction of special mining taxation, or reduction of rents would be gone. The Province, retaining its land revenue intact, could, and is prepared to, give up the Gold Duty. A Gfoldfields County, with its share of the residue of the land revenue, and endowed out of a fund it*itself would contribute to, could not—neither would its ruling members wish to—give up what they would be speedily educated to count upon as a sure fund for payment of interest on money borrowed for County works.

If the Premier is in earnest in deprecating the special conditions under which the goldminer is at present only allowed to carry on his industry, the first step taken by hia -Government should be the removal of these special conditions. One and all are contained in the words " special taxation." The Premier would hardly accuse Goldfield members with being the fathers of special taxation. The miner for gold should be placed on the same footing as the miner for coal or the plougher for turnips. He might pay as he does now in miners' rights and certificates the value of his land, but beyond this he ought to be allowed to live on equal terms with his neighbors. Then, like them, he could pay his fair share of the rate struck on property in his County for local works. To the Premier's creed that the exceptional treatment claimed for the miner by some Goldfields members is not to be sanctioned except in a continued imposition by special burden we entirely demur. Such a one-sided bargain is preposterous. Keally our G-oldfields contemporaries should pity our confusion, and expound to us the wisdom they admire, which, to us, appears but tentative blundering, ignorance, and incapacity.