124
Air Raid Precautions Department; thirdly to meet the additional
expenses in various directions necessitated by new services
created to meet war time necessities, c.g. maintenence of
German internees, censorship services, etc. The whole bal.nce
of the proceeds will be made available as a special war
contribution to His Majesty's Government, to be spent as they
think fit, locally or at home. This will be entirely addition-
al to the ordinary Defence Contribution of 6,000,000 per annum
which will continue to be a charge on the ordinary budget. The
new expenditure on the Income Tax Department and on speciul war
expenditure will of course be duly authorized by this Council
and estimates for those purposes will be submitted as soon as
they can be prepared. Members will naturally want to know how
this is expected to work out in figures.
standard rate of Income Tax of 10%, with a possible surtax on
very high incomes. I will explain later more of the detall,
but the yield at 10% was put by the Taxation Committee at about
10,000,000 per annum. I can at present give no reliable
estimate of the costs of administration but they are likely to
be only a small percentage.
The local defence and war axpenses
e are proposing a
are not likely to aggregate more than 2,0 ̈0,000 per annum and
the balance payable to His Majesty's Government should be of the
or „3,000,000 order of $7,000,000. I do bog, however, that nobody will hold
these figures against me if they turn out wrong. There are no
statistics whatever of total incomes in the Colony and we ero
compelled to do a lot of guesswork at this stage.
Turning to the ordinary budget, we must reckon with
increases in expenditure in many services not directly
connected with the war. All supplies, for instance, are likely
to cost more; unfortunately as we are so dependent on imports
we can do very little to prevent prices rising.
Revenue on the
other hand, is likely to suffer by tile reduction in our swollen