GOVERNOR GREY'S EXPENDITURE. [From the Daily News.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VI, Issue 469, 30 January 1850, Page 4

GOVERNOR GREY'S EXPENDITURE. [From the Daily News.]

'Captain Grey, the Governor of New Zealand, is a lucky man, quite as lucky as the •Rajah Brooke, and with even a greater reputation for talent. These stars in the colonial administration have more than talent and fortune in common, they have also the faculty of being enormously prodigal. They expend more in proportion to the numbers they govern, than any potentate in Europe, not excepting Queen Victoria herself. We publish in another portion of this paper a letter from an ex-member of the Legislative Council of Aucklaud, on the subject of New Zealand government expenditure, the disclosures of which are quite monstrous. This expenditure the writer calculates at from £5 to £6 per head of the colonists. GovernoT Grey received very general approbation for the cool manner which he returned to Earl Grey bis lordship's constitution for New Zealand. The approbation was given as a thing of course, it having passed into a certainty, that when the -colonial office originates anything, it is sure to be impracticable and unsuited. And therefore Captain Grey's determination to remain autocrat was highly approved of. * The governor's subsequent conduct, however, makes one mistrust considerably the justice and expediency of this approval. When we learn, that " since 1846 there have been no estimates or appropriation of revenue submitted to the council," although that council is a nominee one, and when one sees the expenditure calculated at from £100,000 to £150,000 a-year, one is inclined to think that, after all, Lord Grey's constitution might have been better than an autocracy. People laughed at the idea of municipal government in New Zealand.. And one corporation in Wellington and another in Auckland might have been rude in oratory and not very transcendental in politics. But at least they would not have spent £50,000 a year each. They never would have sanctioned the outlay of £15,000 a-year for a governor and his court. Neither would they have allowed the large sums accruing from the sale of lands, that should form the principal revenue of a new colony, to be swallowed up in the expenses of surveying !

New Zealand, although the youngest of our colonies, is in fact already the most expensive : it equals Van Diemen's Land itself, burdened ds that colony is with a convict establishment, in its demands both upon the colonists and on the mother country. It requires an equal a umber of troops; an army which costs, in pay and commissariat £72,000 in 1847 ; which in addition to the £150,000 calculated in the letter, forms a most extravagant total. The expense of New South Wales itself, an old, and extensively-peopled colony, it scarcely more than these two sums put together. Whatever success, therefore, may have attended Governor Grey's rule in New Zealand, has been, it must be admitted, dearly paid for. We do not propose to cashier or to recall an able officer. What is wanting is some check in the colony itself (for the Colonial Office is quite incapable of wisely applying one) upon that natural tendency to extravagance which uncontrolled power begets, and which the wisest cannot resist. To expect to find such a check in a council composed of the officials of Auckland, a council from which the Governor *ook care to expel the only men that differed with him, were idle indeed. The proprietors and traders of Wellington and of the South have as much right, and as much ability, to control their own expenditure, as Englishmen have to question domestic finances. And their total exclusion from the management of the country and its finances, generates not merely idle prodigality in government, but mistrust and disaffection in the governed. The revenues of New Zealand, if rightly managed, and expended with that modesty which becomes an infant colony, would be fully equal to meet, not merely the expenses of civil government and national improvement, but also of the milifary force which it might be deemed necessary to keep in addition to its militia of armed inhabitants. It is time to put an end to the military rule in New Zealand, and to a dictatorship, a policy, and a prodigality, which savours far more of the Horse Guards than of a civilian and responsible administration.