THE WEAK POINTS OF THE MINISTRY.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 219, 11 April 1872, Page 9

THE WEAK POINTS OF THE MINISTRY.

The "Canterbury JPress" gives the following as its reasons for opposing the present Government : — " We regard them as thoroughly unsafe and untrustworthy men to be at the head of affairs. Their only idea. of government is to continually excite the country with stimulants — to borrow hugely and keep a large Government expenditure going on, heedless alike of the productiveness of the work and the meaus of repayment. Mr. Yogel, the master spirit of the Cabinet, is both as a politician and financier, cursed with an inappeasable thirst for the sensational. He is al ways striving after some grand coup. He is never satisfied unless doing something to make people stare with wonder, and to help himself, his Government, and the 'colony to cut a figure in the eyes of the world. This propensity he indulges at no small cost to the country. The magnificent contracts, the negotiation of which affords him such endless delight, invariably have the result of inflicting a heavy burden on the colony without any thing approaching an adequate return. But our main charge against the Government is their maladministration of the public works scheme. Instead of wise and honorable administrators, they have proved seltish and unscrupulous partisans. They have thrown aside the safeguards by which a former legislature endeavored to confine the expenditure of the loan to remunerative purposes ; and have shown themselves eager only to win the popular suffrages, and ready to satisfy the most exorbitant demands in return for a corresponding amount of political support. The whole scheme — which it was their first duty to watch over with jealous care, resisting to the utmost local out-cries, in the interests of the colony at large — has in their hands been perverted into a means of securing their hold upon office by a wholesale indiscriminate purchase of votes. The effect has been most demoralising on themselves, the legislature, and the country. The tone of political life has become sensibly relaxed, and Government have been permitted to free themselves from the control of Pai'limen tto an unprecedented degree. They have contrived with the tacit sanction of the House, to shake off very much of the constitutional restrictions imposed on the action of Ministers, especially in the spending of public money. And thus left to their own devices, they have been so recklessly extravagant that in two years, irrespective of all extraordinary expenditure, and after charging all defence expenditure upon loan, they have exceeded their income, and added to the permanent debt of the colony, by no less than- £383,450 — at the rate of upwards of £190,000 a year.