Fiji's doing

well, thanks

From a Suva correspondent There was no doubt about it.

When Fiji’s Minister of Finance Wesley Barrett disclosed his budget secrets to the House of Representa tives on November 26, it was plain to all that the dominion, in the 13 months it has paddled its own canoe, had done very well.

On the surface it looked as if inde pendence was costing a lot. Mr.

Barrett was budgeting for a record spending of $74,979,086, which is $25,487,148 more than this year’s figure, but he wasn’t worried about it. The dominion’s economy, he said, had had a year of “dynamic and sustained” growth. He was so little worried, in fact, that his only tax increases were 10 per cent, on im ported cars—an attempt to cut those imports rather than raise the wind— and 6c on a packet of cigarettes made from imported tobacco.

The only other tax changes were downward and bound to gladden sporting hearts. He reduced, and in some cases scrapped altogether, the import duty on sports equipment and sports clothing.

The government was getting more from taxation this year than expected and would end this year with a sur plus of $1 million instead of a deficit of the same figure. He’s also hoping for a surplus next year. On the debit side, though, was a predicted trade deficit of $36 million but no trouble —receipts from tourism would whittle that down.

So far as production is concerned everything was rosy. The gross domestic product for 1971 is expected to be about $2lO million, an increase of about seven per cent, on the 1970 figure, which is 0.3 per cent, over the Development Plan’s gross domestic product target. That’s good news in anybody’s country.

Apart from smokers and those wanting a new car, perhaps the only other people saddened by some aspects of this happy budget were the foreign investors. Mr. Barrett said the government intended to put the brakes on foreign companies operating in Fiji on locally-borrowed capital. What Fiji wanted, he said, was the foreign investor who brought with him both know-how and money.