An interesting day in Parliament today concluded early with a short but fiesty Motion to Adjourn. If there's one lesson to be learned from today's events it's to check your work.
The Premier went on the attack with a couple of truly ridiculous arguments, attacking the UBP for 'falsely accusing the Government of waste'.
The Premier delivered a Ministerial statement this morning and the PLP website has posted this extremeley misleading statement entitled "Setting the Record Straight". I'm not sure how the Premier's New Press Secretary Glenn Jones (a guy I developed a real fondness for during his time at the Gazette) is going to be able to look himself in the mirror if these are the press releases he's supposed to churn out in an effort to hoodwink his former colleagues in the media -- where his job was to inform the public not deceive them.
Just to set the scene, last week the Premier and other Ministers provided answers to some UBP Parliamentary questions on Ministerial travel.
The UBP then provided those to the press and drew some of their own conclusions, conclusions which were based on the information they were given by the Premier.
The problem? Well, Dr. Brown would like you to believe that the UBP misrepresented the facts, but all the UBP did was summarise the numbers which they were given, numbers the Premier now says were wrong. "An accounting error" at the Ministry of Finance put some items in the wrong category overstating the Premier's $4,000 a night hotel stay and his $19,000 worth of gifts. Nowhere in "Setting the Record Straight" does it say that the wrong information came courtesy of the Premier, which resulted in the 'misleading' information.
He really is incapable of admitting that he can make a mistake.
It would seem that Dr. Brown didn't bother to check the answers to the questions before they were released, and hence today he was desperately trying to regain face. Rather than just admit that the numbers were wrong, he blamed the UBP for false attacks. Juvenile.
But here's the kicker, and probably why the Premier was so riled up: this Premier has been living it up on us so long that no-one said "That can't be true, he wouldn't spend $4,000 a night for a hotel room". The whole island just shrugged, it seemed totally in character.
That was the funniest part.
The other entertainment came courtesy of the desperate complaint that the UBP are using their allotment of questions during Parliamentary Question time to ask probing and specific questions - as they are fully entitled to do. If they didn't they wouldn't be performing their duty as an Opposition.
Even the Speaker had to admonish (gently, but admonish he did), the Premier for accusing the UBP of abusing Parliamentary questions. The Premier tried 4 times to tell that lie, before eventually having to concede and refer to the practice as "the UBP's frequent use of the legitimate Parliamentary questions" so that he could make the next ridiculous statement.
(Credit is due to the UBP's John Barritt for sticking to the wicket and not allowing the Premier to lie about the practice of Oppositions asking questions of the Government. Message to the Premier: We don't live in a totalitarian state. This is a democracy.)
But it gets funnier, even funnier than Dr. Brown struggling to remain composed and contain his temper.
So determined is the Premier to try and shut down future questions and avoid accountability that he tried to argue that Parliamentary questions have become too onerous a burden on the civil service to research and answer (You know the civil service that has grown by almost 1,000 jobs under the PLP's 8 years.)
Now that's funny. We've got about 20 people spinning yarns daily at the Department of Communication, but we can't spare one or two to provide access to information.
I guess we can officially declare that Alex Scott's Public Access to Information legislation is officially D-E-A-D.
Posted by Christian S. Dunleavy