The Westport Times. TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1874.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1143, 20 January 1874, Page 2

The Westport Times. TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1874.

A wide shattering of hopes among the members and adherents of the New Zealand Protective League must result from the blow given by the New South Wales Government against the collection of Customs duty. The example set by the older colony in shaking off the incubus ot a protective tariff as restrictive of commerce and, in bidden guise, a crushing impost on the industry of the consumer, affords an unanswerable argument to the specious plea of New Zealand theorists who would, if they could, add to the complications of the present pernicious Custom House system of taxation by the imposition of specially prohibitive, or as they term it protective, duties on various articles in couimou demand. By recent Australian telegrams it appears that the bold experiment of making Sydney a free port instantly brought to the hands of her merchants a vast influx of business. The representatives of Sydney commercial houses were enabled for the nonce to cut out their Yictorian brothers in trade, and <>reat was the consternation in Melbourne marts. There was no alternative but to submit At one stroke the protective policy, so long bolstered up by Yictorian politicians as a panacea for every ill suffered by the people, came tumbling down from its rotten foundation, and in humbleness and abasement Victoria abandons her protective policy, and is fain to admit that New South Wales has taught her a lesson in political economy. Here in New Zealand, perhaps slowly, but none the less surely and steadily, the same results must follow. The liabilities of the colony are heavy and as yet increasing in greater proportion than her assets, and hence the argument for the retention of indirect taxation as an easy means of levying a heavier rate than would be submitted to by the people, if levied by the direct services of the tax-gatherer, has some present weight, but Victoria following in the wake of New South "Wales, and with her also the adjacent colonies, the establishment of free ports of entry on the Australian coast will compel the adoption of a similar policy in New Zealand. The Customs returns at present levied represent an annual loss in the purchasing power of the country. It encourages extravagant or rather careless habits among the people, it absorbs in unprofitable employment a constantly augmenting army of officials, whose energies are lost to the true •advancement of the colony. It is in every sense of the word a restrictive and obstructive system, a concession to expediency, and opposed to all true liberality of thought or action.