BUDGET 2016: A polished but largely hollow Portia presentation

Opposition Leader Portia Simpson Miller on Thursday made her contribution to the 2016-2017 budget debate in Parliament.

It was a concise presentation totally devoid of the normal fiery and emotion-centred aspect of her persona and limited in terms of frontal direction and proposed solutions.

Noticeably also making specific reference to a particular benefit – advancement of the business processing outsourcing (BPO) sector – that her Administration brought to the country at large, including a concentration in Mandeville, the political home tome of Peter Bunting, the declared challenger to her leadership of the party, Simpson Miller played in full, the stately role in her presentation.

In declaring early that she viewed the close results of the February 25 general elections as having set a new political dimension in the country, “that established that the people are our masters and we are their servants”, Simpson Miller said her party paid dearly for having frontally tackled the choking debt burden that has beset the country for decades.

In contrast, she cited what she described as the “populist approach” which the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government took ahead of its loss at the polls in 2011, which she claimed to have led to the country developing a trust deficit in the international finance community.

However, she commended the present Andrew Holness-led Administration for maintaining the general fiscal path of her Administration, as demonstrated by its recent budget outline. That, she said, signaled the positives of her Government’s policy directions, despite its loss at the polls. That led to an extensive segue into policy initiatives of the last People’s National Party (PNP) Government, which Simpson Miller said had positioned the country for economic growth.

Among the lot, she pointed to the North-South leg of Highway 2000; plans for the Harbour View to Morant Bay leg of a new highway to ultimately be extended to Port Antonio; and an agreement which was forged with US President Barack Obama last April, for Jamaica to become the first non-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) member state to gain access to the United States’ LMG market.

In questioning the tax measures which the Government recently applied to fund the phased introduction of the income tax break which it had promised ahead of the elections, Simpson Miller, claiming not to be about to echo her spokesman’s rebuttal two days earlier, simply questioned the likely negative impacts of the taxes on the intended tax break.

This was while she raised alarm bells, especially, at a significant budget cut to national security portfolio, and the planned but less than smooth withdrawal of auxiliary fees in the high school system, as measures which could threaten significant gains that have been made, and foster breakdowns in the two critical areas of governance.

As a consequence, the Opposition Leader called for a national consultation on education, to which she committed the participation of the PNP.

She also cited national security as being too critical to become a political football, and while acknowledging the challenges which her administration faced with the portfolio, said the source of the problem appears to be not necessarily inadequate policing, and the solution appears to be linked to the successful implementation of a national conflict resolution drive, as there appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way many Jamaicans are relating with each other.

In a jovial banter with Finance Minister, Audley Shaw, during an interjection from the latter, Simpson Miller introduced a newly coined phrase to replace the JLP’s election buzzword ‘prosperity’, which took the party to victory.

“This is not prosperity; this is more like taxperity,” she declared to the House.

The Opposition Leader also questioned the logistical imperatives and relevance of the Government’s new Economic Council, and also the “overloaded” Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation in the Office of the Prime Minister.

But, perhaps the gem of her presentation was her reference to low inflation rates that were achieved during much of the last PNP Administration’s four years in office as being equivalent to a tax reduction, especially in respect of the lower income earners. Now that’s taking economics to another level.