Guarding the Tariff Schedule.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume III, Issue 117, 19 October 1901, Page 3

Guarding the Tariff Schedule.

/the Federal Cabinet’s arixieiy about the tariff waa not. reatricfced to tbe task of drawing it up-hr-the question of its reception by .the country. They had to take elaborate precautions premature disclosure < f the: nevy .duties,; for that might have meant Wious loss. They, con.d not 'prbvent Sydney" merchants id large stocks of articles in anticipation of; the tariff imposing heavy dtffi# on them, but they did and could compel them to work in the dark, not : ' . i i . stmitmV fnfl.

knowing what articles would oe, taxed'or to what extent* .T 6Mr Kingston'fell the privilege of introducing the new tariff. to, the, .most crowded bouse,that was eve£ seen in an Australian Parliament ; to Mr Kingston, therefore,vWlh onel. acodrd hie colleagues in the Cabinet gratefully relinquished the duty; Qi ( guarding, the precious flMafe The fact that "the”’ Miniator-W Gustomehaa holiday,,may, not,be runponqefttedv with- the weight of reapooeipility. that rested-upon him. : Nothing was printed' for a long time, andwritte.h.odp!^ Itt ptooeaa thp taxed were agreed olass|^detwidaaiti&ekhole sohemM Rvati then the duties to be imbpsfed

PiVHII bUCM .VUV .ft'".‘J* 1 m'' f K v^SSt &MftA fMm^'Atld^vb ß :^j^^BMßaE3BEp

employees ‘of the Government Printing-Office. A sufficient number of copies were struck off to b 8 .sent to the various Customs bouses in the Commonwealth, And a record of every one distributed was kept.” All these precautions, notwithstanding, Ministers are said to have bad two dreadful scares during the last fortnight. Their responsibility had made them nervous, and when one day a count of the copies of the tariff showed one to be missing, .they went to bed, after a fruitless search, in an agony of-anxiety, and opened their morning papers with apprehension, lest they- should find ; that the missing copy had been given to one of the newspapers. In the end they found that the copies had been wrongly counted, and that the secrets of the new tariff were still their own. The same thing happened later on, and the Federal Cabinet-must have felt distinctly relieved when the morning of the fateful day arrived with the tariff still ungnessed by the public.— Press,