FINANCIAL STATEMENT.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 383, 14 July 1876, Page 3

FINANCIAL STATEMENT.

No one will dispute the exceeding cleverness of the Premier's Abolition Proposals an (submitted to the country through the Pinaneial Statement. Perhaps they are just a little too clever. The effort to overcome the obstacles oilered, while »ocuring the sine quanon required, is too obvious. We venture, this week, no close analysis of the Statement, but merely indicate a few leading characteristics. Land revenue is charged with railways, with education, with charitable institutions, and ■with arterial communications. A policy is indicated to gradually extinguish the Educational reserves, or rather to divert them from educational purposes, and thereby in four years to swell the Consolidated .Fund'of the Colony. As all these charges are to be borne bv land revenue, it will bo asked what is to bo done with Provinces that have none ? The answer is simple. They are to receive grants of money from the Colony at will of the Assembly. In other words, are to be kept in the position of paupers at will, and tho land fund of tho Colony is to be nationalised, not directly but indirectly, through the Customs House and the educational estate of the Southern Provinces. Tho Goldfields revenue is to receive no subsidy, but ia to be cast into the County treasury for expenditure in that County. Mining taxation is to be perpetuated in order to relieve tho direct local taxation upon those who own or hold any lesser estate ia land. It is to bo hoped that the few Centralists ou the Goldfields will now perceive that the views put; out by this paper ever since the Government proposals were telegraphed last session have been correct, and advocated solely in the interests of the residents in these Goldfields themselves.