OTAGO
PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT GAZETTE.
(PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY).

VOL. XX. DUNEDIN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 17, 1876. NO. 1024.

THE following further correspondence is published for general information :-

General Government Offices,
Wellington, 3rd May, 1876.

SIR,—I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 22nd April, in reply to mine of the 13th.

2. There are a few points to which I think it desirable to reply : to others I do not refer, either because I consider that I have answered them by what I have already written to your Honor, or because they seem to me of a in quogue nature, and entirely out of place in this correspondence.

3. I am not aware that in my letter to you I assumed that Parliament would render the Government more support than Governments usually anticipate. There would be no strength in any government, if fear of a minority becoming a majority were allowed to interfere with the ordinary duties of administration. I desired to represent to your Honor that as, by law, the provinces cease to exist after next session, the General Government were performing only their duty in obtaining the information necessary to provide for the charge which will then devolve on them.

4. You refer to my action some years ago, when I had the honor to be a member of the Otago Provincial Executive. I acted then, as now, in accordance with what I believed to be my duty, and I do you the justice to believe that you are similarly actuated. As you have twice referred to me personally, I may be allowed to say that I continued to aid the provinces, and to believe they might be enabled to survive, long after that belief was dead in the minds of some of the most acute men in New Zealand. No province has, in my opinion, more contributed to make abolition necessary than has Otago—for it has refused to accept any limit to its desire to expend money. That, without the means at its command, it should have embarked in a variety of railway schemes, not content with the lines in progress from the Waitaki to the Bluff, from Invercargill to Kingston, and from Milton to Lawrence, sufficiently proves the necessity for the check the Assembly has imposed. Nor does this appear to have been done too soon, for notwithstanding the largeness of your Honor’s views as to Otago’s capabilities, the fact is that, in order to find means for meeting the expenses of the next six months, your Honor’s Government have had to attempt to make land sales of a most objectionable nature. I refer to the sales proposed to be made to runholders, without competition, in defiance, as I am advised, of the intention of the law, and which, I feel bound to inform your Honor, the Government would have taken means to prevent, but for the conviction that the Waste Lands Board would do so.

5. Your Honor’s opinion of the manner in which the Provincial Government carry on their public works is entirely different from that which we are able to arrive at, from the information at the command of the Government. That information is to the effect that the provincial railways have been very imperfectly constructed.

6. I regret that your Honor should venture to make such an assertion as to the cost of the Clutha Railway. The Government have in their service several engineers of standing and long experience. There is no engineer in the employment of the province whose opinions are entitled to equal weight. Persons may always be found ready to express opinions, but I should have thought Otago had suffered quite enough to make its Government cautious as to assailing the work of men of experience.

7. You certainly do not rightly interpret my meaning in supposing that I said our political institutions were to be influenced by money-lenders. I think the passage to which you refer clearly enough expressed my meaning, that the colony should not commit itself to the expenditure of borrowed money in excess of the amount which those from whom it looked for the money were willing to supply.

8. Your Honor’s idea of making Otago an independent colony is impossible of realization—fortunately for the people of that province, who certainly would not gain by the proposal, which, as I have already pointed out, would mean centralized power in Dunedin, and financial difficulties of a very grave character.