W. Samoa's

Missing and Mysterious

£126,000

Budget Mistake

T'HE mystery of the missing A grant of £126,000 and Western Samoa’s consequent

budget difficulties (PIM, August

p. 22) was top item on the agenda at the opening of West

ern Samoa’s Legislative As

sembly on August 20. Members

heard the High Commissioner,

in a 2i hours opening speech,

discuss the matter at length, and

then shortly afterwards ad

journed the House for six days to

digest the implications.

When making up estimates for the current financial year, the Western Samoa Government evidently took into calculations a grant of £126,000 which it expected to get from the Western Samoa Trust Estates Corporation (the new name for the old Reparation Estates which was handed over as a gift to the people of Samoa a few months ago by the former owners, the New Zealand Government). Grants from this organisation have been annual events since the end of the war.

The directors of the Corporation, quite properly, decided that they needed this money for reserves as they could not any longer fall back on the New Zealand Government for assistance. The Corporation is already the biggest contributor to internal revenue through taxes and imposts; the biggest employer of labour and the largest exporter of copra and cocoa.

At the end of August, members of the Assembly were still milling around trying to find why this huge mistake in Government budgeting could have occurred and had arrived at an assortment of reasons none of which have much apparent validity.

It seems that in the past, the Western Samoa Government has leaned so heavily on assistance from New Zealand grants for education, public works, etc., that the local Government has come to believe that these monies are Western Samoa’s by inalienable right, and that Budget estimates are made on the assumption that they will be forthcoming.

In his speech, the High Com missioner said that the West Samoan Government was “making firm representations to the NZ Government” about the grant: and

that it was expected to cut Government expenditure that had been planned for the current year.

Although some MLA’s were inclined to tag the non-existent grant of £126,000 as a “blessing in disguise”, in that W. Samoa could now see where it was heading, it was obvious that most of them are far from happy over the Territory’s financial position.