Budget damp squibs

“THEY HAVE nothing to say,” said Finance Minister Colm Imbert about the Opposition as he wrapped up the budget debate in Parliament on Wednesday. Mr Imbert could easily have been referring to members of his own bench too.

In any given year, the budget debate is the most important. This year, despite alarming levels of crime causing the population severe distress, MPs decided to put off long-awaited bipartisan talks to facilitate discussion of the annual fiscal package.

By the time Mr Imbert wrapped up on Wednesday, though, many were left wondering why they had bothered.

The defining characteristic of the budget package has turned out to be how it changes little, if anything. There are no new taxes, no new sources of substantial relief.

The world is undergoing all manner of change, but there was a sense of Parliament being frozen in time – so much so that even the usual “bombshells” relating to current or recent events did not materialise.

Many were the officials who tried to “buss a mark.” Some politicians, it seems, have only just discovered that there are problems with food cards, problems with the provision of housing and problems with the social safety measures the State administers.

One minister, raising what she deemed the “alarming” issue of an audit report relating to eight-year-old matters, spoke of “an unanalysed sum” and “ghost houses.”

An opposition member, speaking about houses started six years ago, disclosed problems with foundations, problems with the reinforcement of beams, problems with project management, saying it all suggested: “a serious, serious matter of mismanagement, waste and possibly corruption.”

Another Opposition member decried the “liposuction” of local government reform. All somehow felt their contributions befitted the gravitas of the chamber.

Maybe those who enforce Parliament’s rules and police contributions have done too good a job over the years.

Or maybe – and we think this more likely – MPs have simply run out of new things to say and to reveal. Neither possibility is comforting.

What is ironic is that the Government and Opposition seem to have united in their penchant to treat programmes relating to our social safety net as mere political footballs and not substantive measures are integral to our nation’s progress and to the State’s fulfilment of its social contract.

It is, unfortunately, a truism that Trinidadians know how to spoil a good thing. Some of our highly laudable social programmes – from the Chronic Disease Assistance Programme (CDAP) to the shrunken Government Assistance for Tuition (GATE) scheme – have always been subject to abuse and bobol.

But social programmes should be improved, not turned into mere vehicles for mudslinging, as so often, and as they were in this now-ended “debate.”