A DISHONEST FINANCIAL POLICY

The FNM is enhancing its reputation every day as a dishonest government. The PLP needs to change the narrative these days and instead of saying the FNM is engaged in sloppy or negligent budgeting that they are plain out and out dishonest.  This would fit right into the way they ran their campaign: sown in dishonesty. The most recent examples are the report from the Minister of Tourism that the country needs 200 million dollars to complete the works on the airports needed around the country and the upgrades at those airports. However, he added only one per cent of the monies required were allocated in the budget. That is the height of dishonesty.  That means they are trying to fool the public; they misled the parliament and they misled other stakeholders including the international ratings agencies. Then the Government on Saturday 25 August 2019 had the Finance Ministry brief the trade unions on the state of the economy. What came out in the meeting is that even though the Government knew or had to have known that the industrial agreement between the Bahamas Public Service Union and the Government had expired and was being renegotiated, they made no provisions for the necessary increases in salaries that would come.  So, they deliberately presented a budget to Parliament which they had to have known was woefully inadequate for the contingencies which they might reasonably have expected. This is not negligence. This is dishonesty. Now they are seeking to blame the Unions, saying that it is their fault that they did not put in proposals for financial demands before the budget period.  But that is nonsense.  It is the role of the Finance Ministry to anticipate annual spending and they could not have thought or believed that there would be no demand for salary increases. It was there responsibility to anticipate the increases.It was simply dishonest budgeting.