CO129-582-7 Taxation 6-6-1939 - 5-2-1940 — Page 119

Your Axcellency,

120

You have indicated in their main outlines the

Financial intentions of Government in the new conditions which exist today. Circumstance have unfortunately compelled the Government to put those intentions before Council and the Colony which that Council represers in two stages. There has been

no time since the outbreak of war to reach finality in our

proposals for wartime measures and then to reprint the estimates in accordance with our decisions: on the other hand, in view of the approaching end of the inancial year, it was inadvisable to defer presentation until the estimates could be recast in print so as to conform with those later proposals. The only possible course, therefore, was to lay the estimates as printed before the Council, to state when doing so that they would undergo a considerable metamorphosis and lastly in Select Committee to

Lecast them in their new form, or rather forms, for there will

be two budgets for the duration of the war where one used to

grow in peace time.

I am very sorry for any confusion that this way of handling the subject may have caused but in the circumstances I

fear that that was inevitable. But so far as the ordinary

estimates of expenditure concerned the changes to be made are of a "paper" rather than a practical nature: it is the

defence budget where most of the innovations come.

We propose, as Your Excellency has said, to have two

4h will strongly resemble the

budgets, the ordinary onc

י .

budgets of previous years, and a defence budget which will be

quite new and I hope a feature of only a year or two.

After that gener

explanation I have