On the financial side the government proposes to the States that it will cease to pay them a per capita allowance annually *~t will at the same time evacuate the field of direct taxation by levying no tax upon incomes of £2,000 a year and less. This will give the States a taxable field of £8,000,000 as against the loss of £7,000,000 in per capita allowance. But the States do not like this. It means that though their citizens will save money, hitherto paid to the Commonwealth, the State itself will have to increase its own taxation practically to the amount of the saving. The States would much rather the Commonwealth bore the onus of raising the money. The ancient maxim that it is well that a man should only spend money of his own earning does not appeal to them, and unless Mr. Bruce is a much stronger man than at present appears he will find it difficult to resist the pressure of the States when applied to him through members of the Federal parliament. The single gauge proposition is the natural outcome of the refusal of South Australia and Victoria to have anything to do with the conversion of their 5-ft. 3-in. lines into the standard gauge of 4-ft. 8}-in. A glance at the map will show that the proposed new lines from Port Augusta in South Australia to a convenient point in New~* South Wales, where it will link up with the standard gauge line through to Brisbane will supply those interior lines of communication, upon the absence of which the late Earl Kitchener strongly animadverted. It will also cut out the deviation—Adelaide to Melbourne and Melbourne to Sydney—which adds several hundred miles to the communication between east and west, and gives the traveller an_unnecessary 36 hours' travelling. The cities concerned will all be linked up with the line, but. the direct and rapid communication will not be broken, and so far as Queensland and New South Wales are concerned they will be able to send supplies through to Western Australia without any break of gauge. Each break averages a loss of six hours, both for the trucks arriving and those departing, while the losses from deterioration of the good themselves is almost incalculable. The new line will cost £8,000,000, and take about five years to build. The work will at once give employment to workers now in Australia and to many of the best class of migrants. On their merits there is much to recommend kath the financial and the railway proposals. The inertia of the States may block the first, and the dog-inthe-manager policy of South Australia and Victoria the second, but if Mr. Bruce is the strong, steadfast politician his friends hitherto alleged him to be, he may carry through both propositions to the benefit of the country and his own reputation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.