The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1877.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5204, 26 November 1877, Page 2

The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26 , 1877.

As Sir George Grey’s Government have been in office more than seven weeks, even Mr. Reynolds will now probably be satisfied that they have had time to mature and declare their policy. Their have been Ministerial Statements of one kind or another in both Chambers of the Legislature; , but each one has been different from or inconsistent with that which preceded it, and appeared to have been made to suit the varying circumstances of the hour, so as to allure a stray vote or satisfy a doubting adherent, and not to propound broad views or settled political, convictions. Excepting the original proposal to reduce Ministers salaries, and either to make them pay rent for or to sell the Ministerial residences, and the very raw project of taking the land revenue from the provincial districts, recently announced by the Colonial Treasurer—the 'true financial result of which, by the way, Mr. Larnach has evidently not realised—it does not appear that Ministers have any policy at present other than that which belonged to their predecessors. They have taken from the late Government their Education Bill, their Land: Bill,-their Mines Bill, their District Railways Bill, their Native policy, and, after all their fine promises about reduction of expenditure, they have taken the Estimates which were already prepared,andarogettingthempassed without objection as without change. It is in the Supplementary Estimates only that they have (RmUM from tho course of their : predecessors, and-there they are going wrong. Their tendencies,are declared to fib more centralists than those of the avowed centralists whom they have displaced, and i.tliat is all. If cheap Government, irl so far as tho pay of members of the Executive is concerned, were a very great desideratum, Sir George Grey certainly has a ‘ ‘ pull but their is a proverbial concomitant of cheapness which

may not be found wanting in this case. Although a proposal to make the pay of a Minister of the Crown equal to that of a managing clerk in a solicitor’s office,‘or much less than that of an inspector of a local bank, might be applauded at the stump, observant men in the world out of doors, who have lent us their money and tp whom we are looking for more millions, may take a different view, and may he puzzled to reconcile the alleged need for the sale of Ministerial residences and the reduction of Ministerial salaries with our boastful assurances of the extent of our resources and our perfect ability to meet ourengagements. The world maynotbe willing to trust “cheap” Ministers implicitly. In truth more public money has been wasted in the late three-months’ struggle for office, and more public money and more of the public estate will yet be wasted in this session in providing for bogus appropriations under the head of “ Provincial liabilities,” and in meeting demands of private members for endowments, —demands which the Government, if they do not encourage, are too weak to resist—than would suffice to cover all the charges on the civil list for Ministers’ salaries, as they now exist, during the remainder of this century. The proposal to make the Land Fund colonial revenue has our entire approval. Its effect financially, however, will not we think be such as is commonly supposed; bat it is the right thing to do. There is no certainty as yet even that it will really be carried into effect by Sir George Grey. There is so much exaggeration in and such an element of unreliability about all that lie says,.that confidence in the stability of any of his purposes which has not a spitefully personal or individual character is precluded. He would certainly, we think, take the Piako Swamp instantly from _ the purchasers if he could, but there is no sign that he iis equal to grasping the larger question of the Land Fund in an intelligent or statesmanlike spirit. On the 26th October he would, as he declared, “have shrunk with shame from the expedient which the members of tho late Government have had recourse to in reference to those sums which they proposed to take, without the authority of law, from the land fund of Canterbury and Otago, and would have scorned to he a party to such a transaction.” Yet, on the 19th of November he was ready without shame to make the Land Fund colonial revenue, and to take it all, excepting 20 per cent., which was to be localised for public works. Assurances have been given that the unity of the colony shall be preserved ; that no attempt to disturb it will be made ; yet we see the Rev. Dr. Wallis, a staunch ally and confidential adviser of the Premier, and one of his personal followers in the House of Representatives, deliberately declaring at a public meeting in Auckland, and urging as a claim to the confidence of the people, that Sir George Grey was for separation ; so was Mr. Macandrew. Dr. Wallis ought to know ; and as one supporting fact is worth more than any number of speeches, it was announced on Saturday in an evening contemporary here—apparently by authority—that the process of separation had even already been begun by dividing the police force of the South Island from that of the North, and making it a distinct body under a local commander ; —“ demilitarising ” it, is the euphemism for the occasion. There is no character which a Government can acquire more fatal to itself and more dangerous to the public interest than a character for shiftiness and unreliability. There was an antecedent probability that those qualities might become prominent in the Ministry as it is at present constituted, but no one was prepared for such an early and impolitic exhibition of them. Sir George Grey could not have attained to the Premiership by any fair means in a fair parliamentary battle in the recognised constitutional fashion ; but having attained it, he has contrived, in the face of the majority, to keep it up to this time by means of a series of “dodges,” of the success of which we would fain hope that he is not proud.