The OBA will get Bermuda back on track

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7: In the Bermuda Sun last week, the Progressive Labour Party’s Walter Roban called the One Bermuda Alliance the party of ‘NO’. He said that the OBA has a win-at-all-costs mentality, even if it means destroying Bermuda in the process.

As a member and approved candidate of the OBA, I can assure all right-thinking Bermudians that my colleagues in the OBA and I have no intention of destroying Bermuda in our goal of bringing good governance to our beloved island home. Unfortunately, the PLP have proven by their inescapable track record that they are more than capable of ‘destroying Bermuda’ on their own without any OBA assistance.

Mr. Roban said the OBA was willing to scuttle the PLP’s well-established reputation as responsible managers of Bermuda for the sake of winning the next election. After reading this bit, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.  I began to reflect on the PLP’s well-documented record of management and the following came to mind.

We now live in a Bermuda where government debt, under the leadership of the PLP, has grown 700 per cent since 2006. Government’s latest budget has added an additional $200m to our already spiralling-out-of-control debt. The PLP government now pays $115m per year in interest payments alone to service this debt.

Under this government, millions of taxpayer dollars have evaporated into the ether as a result of no-bid contracts, deals that seem to be for the benefit of PLP friends and family, and there have been seemingly endless breaches of government’s own financial instructions. There has been no accountability for these breaches, and it’s no secret that the Auditor General has major issues with the PLP government’s methods of financial management.

Things are now so dire that this government has had to go hat in hand to the various unions to get them to agree to let the PLP divert $62m from government employee pension funds, so that government can pay those niggling government expenses, and avoid having to pay the interest they would have paid had that $62m been borrowed from a financial institution.

I reflected on the PLP government’s own policies which were implemented and then subsequently reversed or revised recently due to so called ‘unintended consequences’.

Flip flops

These were consequences that government was warned about prior to implementing them, warnings this PLP government chose to ignore. Some examples include initially requiring licensed teachers in the classrooms, resulting in the firing of unlicensed teachers, but later reversing this policy to allow unlicensed teachers in the classroom once again. Free tuition at the Bermuda College had to be stopped. Free TCD licensing and land tax for seniors had to be revised. Requiring land ownership licenses for Bermudians with non-Bermudian spouses added to the destruction of Bermuda’s once-thriving real estate market, and was then reversed. There was rollback of the payroll tax hike after its initial implementation had killed Bermudian jobs. And there was the most recent flip-to-this, flop-to-that set of revisions to customs duty rates.

Mr Roban said in his article that the OBA said ‘NO’ to joint sacrifice on pay cuts for public officials. This is where we must jump out of the PLP’s washing machine spin cycle. As a matter of fact, the OBA was the first out the gate in April of 2011, even before the leader of the BIU suggested that government officials should take a pay cut, by saying that if elected to government, the OBA would decrease government ministers’ salaries by 10 per cent, to set an example in these difficult times.

Premier Paula Cox responded publicly and quite assertively, dismissing the OBA’s stance on this issue, saying that government taking pay cuts was the politics of appeasement, an empty gesture. Well, we all know how that turned out, don’t we?

So, is the OBA in fact a party that says ‘NO?’  Sometimes we do.  Here are just a few things the OBA definitely says ‘NO’ to.

We say ‘NO’ to mishandling and mismanagement of the public purse. We say ‘NO’ to reckless, out-of-control government spending with no accountability. We say ‘NO’ to the amateurish way the PLP government has handled tourism, healthcare, education and International business. The OBA definitely says ‘NO’ to the PLP government’s cronyism and nepotism.

Conversely, the OBA says ‘YES’ to generating jobs and financial security for Bermudians and our guests. The OBA says ‘YES’ to reducing debt. The OBA says ‘YES’ to financial discipline and accountability and regaining control of government spending.

And finally, the OBA says ‘yes, we shall get Bermuda back on track’ to all Bermudians!

There is a choice, and that choice is yours.

Sylvan Richards is the OBA’s election candidate in Constituency 7, Hamilton South.