difficult material anyway and we have a right to request that it be made easier, more self-evident reading.
I accept that much of the information is for the record, but little effort is made to offer it in such a way as to present a clear picture, of the Government's true financial position let alone with projections of future revenue and expenditure and information about all its actual as well as its contingent liabilities. As I have mentioned, the Letter B liability is not included at present and, although the Financial Secretary mentioned "the liability arising from the bond issue" in the Budget Speech, that is not there either.
Now, I am sure we all welcome the Financial
Secretary's intention to present a balanced Budget in a year's time. But, in stating this intention, has he fully comprehended the task facing him? Despite the tax increases in the 1983 and 1984 Budgets, recurrent expenditure has since 1981-82 been growing much faster than recurrent revenue, with the result that the surplus on recurrent account has shrunk from 7.7 billion dollars in 1981-82 to 4 billion in 1984-85. But for the new revenue proposals for the coming year, it would
shrink further.
We all know that we must have a surplus on recurrent account because we could not finance anything like our current programme of capital expenditure from capital revenue alone, which is estimated at only 2.3 billion dollars for the coming year, against capital expenditure on Revenue Account of 8.6
billion dollars.
The key question is how do we obtain a sufficient recurrent surplus? I believe that we cannot afford to go on increasing taxes every year to do it but I fear that that is what the Financial Secretary has in mind. In the final
paragraph of the Budget Speech he said
-