It is most gratifying to hear Deputy O'Higgins ask me to publish it. I have not got the funds to do so myself. It is a matter for the direction of the House, rather than of one Member.
Just to make one further point about Deputy T.F. O'Higgins and his comments—he was, as usual, very upset because he was accusing Fianna Fáil of stealing Fine Gael policies and putting them into effect. It can not be stated too often that there is a basic difference between an Opposition Party and a Party in power. A Party in power can produce a policy only when it has the determination and the means to put that policy into effect. A Party in Opposition can—and Fine Gael have proved that they can and have—produce policies by the hundred abandoning those which appear embarrassing at any time and inventing new ones. It is always easy to produce policies when you have not got the agonising responsibility of implementing them. If you produce enough policies—and God knows, Fine Gael have produced plenty—on the law of averages, you must come up with a good idea once or twice—they cannot be that stupid; I do not think they are really—but you cannot then say that all the good ideas come from Fine Gael. They do not, and, if they did, Fine Gael would be on this side of the House, a situation which does not seem likely to arise in the foreseeable future.
To get back to the Budget, first of all, I should like to comment on the general frame of the Budget speech itself. It was novel in its presentation; it was very clear; it was produced in a methodical way and in language understandable to the ordinary man in the street. There has been a tendency in such matters previously to speak in a jargon which the ordinary man can never understand. This was straight, honest-to-goodness stuff. It was produced in a way which anyone who really made the effort could—and, I think, did—understand.
Deputy Dillon in his criticism made some references to the practice which he deprecated of allowing civil servants to become members of councils and so on, like NIEC, to sign those reports and thereby to identify themselves and lose their anonymity. I know in past years it has always been the practice that these senior officers of the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Finance have tended to be faceless men. I do not see any advantage in that at all. I know from my reading it has been freely discussed in the United Kingdom that certain leading officers of the Treasury in London have been responsible for certain actions. This is something we have got to face.
An increasing responsibility for Government rests now on the permanent Civil Service. They are advisers at a very high level, and in many cases they may be actually taking decisions. Whether we like it or not, we have got to live with it. If we are going to have people in that capacity, I would much rather know who they were. In that way we could get to know them, get to understand their minds and thereby be more constructive in our criticism of their decisions and advice. I think we can in this way achieve rationalisation between that part of the Executive furnished by the Civil Service and that part of the Executive furnished through election procedures.
In his speech the Minister referred to restraint in our wage rates and in our spending at this time. To call this an election Budget, when it contains an appeal and, in fact, a direction for restraint in spending, is just nonsense. This is a down-to-earth, factual statement. The Minister was perfectly right in pointing out that our ability to export, in particular to the United Kingdom, had been greatly handicapped last year by reason of rising costs here. That was a very necessary warning. We have got to put the facts clearly before the people, as, in fact, we always try to do.
You have this business of chasing the additional £1 a week, £5 a month, £50 a year, whatever it may be. Even if it is only sixpence an hour, there is a 40-hour week and you are back to the £1 a week again. Many of these wage increases can be quite illusory when rising prices make their value somewhat less. I find the ordinary man in the street has at last realised that. We have got to get this across to everybody, not just a few, that increasing wealth in this country can only be achieved by increasing production at a highly economic rate. That is the way we get more money to spend. But just raising wage rates is not the solution.
The Minister in his speech paid very proper attention to the increasing needs of education, and I think this is something which has received widespread support. Here, again, the Minister for Education has made it clear— I think we should continue to make it clear to people—that education, like health, cannot be provided free of charge. Somebody is going to pay for it. It is right that those better able to pay, should pay, either by way of direct charge or by way of taxation. We must not allow ourselves to get into the feeling that the community as a whole can get more and more for less and less. The hard facts of life just do not make that possible. Consequently, we have had to have tax increases. They are small enough, but they are there and we have got to accept them.
This so-called election Budget has made small but very well justified concessions in respect of medical expenses, dependent relatives, child allowance and sur-tax earned income relief. This last is the one which has come in for most criticism: simply because there are very few people affected by it. So the mass of the people prefer to court popularity by saying "Do not give any relief to the sur-tax payers. Soak the beggers more and more." That may appear to be a popular approach, but, thank heavens, our people are becoming sufficiently mature to know that that does not make sense. In fact, we need more people in this country liable to sur-tax. If we had more people liable to sur-tax we would have more employment. These are the people who are providing the initiative in the private sector, who are helping with the increase in employment, who are giving employment in their own right and who are subscribing very largely towards the overall cost of State services. It is crazy that we should have a sur-tax system which should make it cheaper for people with incomes of £3,500 and £4,000 a year to live in England than to live here.
In this connection there is just one other point I should like to mention which was not dealt with in the Minister's speech, the question of death duties. I hope the Minister will keep under review this whole question because I believe the present policy is bad business. I have known several cases. I have one in mind in my own constituency where a very elderly man, who came from Northern Ireland to the Republic because he found it more congenial, was eventually forced to emigrate to the Bahamas where he could die more cheaply than he could here. He was a loss to the country. While he stayed here he was paying income tax and sur-tax and giving employment. If we had cut out death duties altogether, or reduced them very considerably, he would have stayed here and contributed that way also. In fact, what happened was that we killed the goose that might have laid the golden egg and he is gone. It would attract more money into the country if this system of estate duty were drastically revised.
There is the matter of the increase in social welfare payments which was decried by Deputy O'Higgins. There, again, I found it in heart to sympathise with him. It must be maddening for him to know, as he does, that every year a Fianna Fáil Government has increased social welfare benefits. It must be maddening to know that, particularly when he thinks of the record of his own Party in that regard. However, it becomes a little bit boring when he comes up with the same crack again: "Why was it not more?" There is only one reason and that is there was no more to give. If we wanted to have an election Budget we could have put the country further in debt and given everyone 10/- a week increase. What would have been the reaction then? —screams from the Opposition that we were buying votes. The really annoying thing for them was that we were seen to be doing the right thing and not to be buying votes.
The Minister, in his very comprehensive speech, dealt with a tremendous number of matters. I do not want to deal with them all, but I should like to commend him for his very personal approach to all aspects of national policy. I am particularly glad that he has clarified still further the matter of Part VII of the Finance Act, 1965. This was something which should never have been introduced. It was a mistake from the start. It was made while the present Taoiseach was Minister for Finance. It was something on which he was doubtful himself, but he was the first Minister that I have ever known to approach such a complex bit of legislation in this way. He said: "I know this is something which should be done in some way. I am not certain that this is the right way to do it. Let us try it and if it does not work out I shall introduce amending legislation which will be retrospective." Deputy Lynch, as Minister for Finance, did that in the Budgets he introduced and did, in fact, rectify matters retrospectively. That, to my mind, is a man's approach to a very difficult matter. Part VII of the Finance Act, 1965, would have been a disaster if it had ever actually gone into effect, but my information is that no final assessments have ever been made under that part for the simple reason that it was unworkable. I am delighted, therefore, that the Minister for Finance has decided that he will extensively recast this legislation.
The purpose of this legislation is ostensibly to tax profiteering and speculation in land. I react immediately against people who use words like "speculation" and "profiteering". It is so easy to throw names around. It it so easy to accuse people of profiteering or speculating, and it is impossible to define what speculation really is. A profiteering speculator is usually a man who is making more money than I am —just as easy as that. Anyone who is making more money than I am is bad and wicked and should be suppressed or taxed out of existence,
That is not the way to approach it. It must be approached on the basis of making land available for housing at a reasonable price. To say that anybody who buys land at any stage is bound to make a stack of money is not true. A speculator is essentially a man who takes risks. It would be just as logical to say that a person who puts money on a horse is bound to make money. Many Members of this House have found to the contrary. The speculator is a man who takes risks, and if he makes a profit it may be profiteering in that his profit is excessive, but he may make a loss as well. There is already adequate power in the hands of the Revenue to tax the income of anyone who is engaged in the buying and selling of land as a venture of trade. There is a propaganda element involved in this piece of legislation. I think the Minister at the time was wrongly advised, and it is excellent that that mistake is going to be rectified.
In particular, I am glad the Minister has decided to produce two Finance Bills, one to cover the actual Budgetary Resolutions and the second one to deal with tax provisions to reform income tax law. There is a tremendous amount of reform still necessary. The Minister and his Department and the Revenue Commissioners have done a wonderful job in the production of the Income Tax Act of 1967 which provides a complete codification of tax law. That in itself is a step forward, but I think it is only one step. When we look at this enormous piece of legislation we must appreciate that something should be done to substitute this by some form of taxation which is more readily understandable.
It is intolerable that one has to employ not only chartered accountants but senior counsel to advise one as to what one's liability may or may not be under the income tax laws of 1967. That has been the situation for years. This is only the first step. We must go a good bit further and amend it very drastically so as to produce a general form of taxation, preferably, to my mind, indirect taxation on expenditure rather than taxation on income. Taxation on income tends to reduce the incentive to earn more, whereas taxation on expenditure encourages saving. We are already moving along that road, and we could move further and faster.
The Minister also dealt with the very difficult but very important matter of the decimalisation of our currency. It looks at the moment as if British Government policy is tending towards the decimalisation of the £ as a unit. Why they have done that goodness alone knows, because there is an increasing body of public opinion in the United Kingdom which is very much against it, and justifiably so, because the smallest item in that currency would be worth 2.4d. which is ludicrous. Then one gets down to a half cent system. The whole purpose of the system is to decimalise, and one does not want half cents in it. The American cent system is obviously better, though this takes you down to, I think, the smallest unit of 1.2d, and there are many things in relation to which halfpennies are still valuable. In the case of tea, sugar, bread, a half-penny is very often an essential unit.
