CHAPTER V
THE PRIVILEGES AND PROCEDURE
§ 1. THE CONTROL OF EXPENDITURE
In every Dominion the rule of course is that moneys can
only be raised and expended with the consent of Parliament.
It is illegal either to levy duties or to spend money without
the consent of Parliament, and the first action has been
tested in the Courts and declared to be illegal, when an
attempt was made to levy customs duties in Victoria without
an Act of Parliament! As regards expenditure the matter
is difficult to bring into court : there is no very obvious way
to deal with expenditure which is not obviously merely
theft, and as a matter of fact the spending of money in the
expectation of parliamentary action is a regular part of
parliamentary practice in some Colonies, and still prevails in
the Australian States to a degree which is decidedly unsatis-
factory. There are the recent and remarkable cases of the
expenditure of over £700,000 by Mr. Philp’s Government
in Queensland in 1907-8, when the Lower House had refused
supply as a protest against the grant of a dissolution, and
the much more improper case in which, at the end of the
same year and at the beginning of 1909, Sir T. Bent authorized
himself the expenditure of very large sums without legal
sanction of any kind, and without any warrant from the
Governor? In this connexion too should be noted the
famous effort made by the suggestion of Mr. Higinbotham
to solve the question of spending moneys without law, when
there was a deadlock in Victoria, and when he allowed
persons claiming moneys from the Government to bring
actions to which judgement was confessed, and the sums
awarded paid out. Unhappily this ingenious scheme was
* Stevenson v. The Queen, (1865) 2 W. W. & A’B. L. 143; but levy of
customs on a resolution in the Lower House when an Act will be passed later
to legalize the levy is allowed as in England ; see ex parte Wallace & Co.,
3 N.S. W. L. R. 1; Sargood Bros. v. The Commonwealth, 11 C. L. R. 258.
* Cf. Victoria Parliamentary Debates, 1909, pp. 330 seq.
