A few quick thoughts on the predictable racial redirect after the first ever open Public Accounts Committee meeting last week - which focused on the Auditor Generals' (that's plural - two Auditor Generals) concerns about Global Hue's handling of Bermuda's Tourism account:
- It's pretty cynical to turn a forward step like opening up secret committee meetings into a backwards argument about race.
I loved this quote from the outgoing Premier: "One of the reasons I supported the public meeting of this committee was to allow the Bermudian public to see what happens when a black-owned company secures a coveted contract from the Bermuda Government."
It goes without saying that if the outgoing Premier saw opening up the Public Accounts Committee meetings as an opportunity to expose racism, he'd have done it the second he could. Immediately. Stat. Instead it took years of cries for transparency from the Opposition UBP, commentators and the public.
- The PLP say that "Bermuda is lucky to have an advertising firm of the caliber of GlobalHue working for us." Really? Lucky? I thought we hired them.
Regardless of what you think of Global Hue, this kind of statement suggests that the power dynamic is screwed up here.
Who's calling the shots? It would appear to be Global Hue judging by their assault on Glenn Bean and his subsequent firing with massive redundancy package. Surely Bermuda should be hiring people who feel like they're lucky to be working for us? Who's working for whom here?
- It isn't automatically racism to question why a contract wasn't put out to competitive bid if the owner of the 'lucky' sole-bidding firm is black.
It would however be racism to award a contract to a firm solely because it is black owned.
Not to mention the fact that this black owned firm is a non-Bermudian one. This raises the question of whether the outgoing Premier is using taxpayer funds for an affirmative action program for non-Bermudians?
Now you can argue about righting historical inequities through affirmative action, or economic empowerment, or whatever term you prefer. But it would be a novel argument that Bermudian taxpayer dollars should be deployed to empower groups historically disadvantaged by non-Bermudian governments. That's a discussion the Bermudian public perhaps should be invited to have first.
- If it's racist to criticize non-tendered contracts for foreign black owned firms, and racist to criticize non-tendered contracts to white owned firms of friends and members of the PLP, then competitively bid contracts are pretty much automatically racist by the PLP's thinking. The rest of the world might be interested in this.
- Surely the PLP are aware that this line of criticism that they're so outraged about - specifically crony capitalism, racially driven contract awarding and whites joining the party out of economic interest - is precisely, precisely, the criticism that they lodged, and continue to lodge at the UBP.
There's no two ways about this. The PLP are on the receiving end of their own tactics, and they don't like it one bit. Howling with derision in response is very unbecoming.
The PLP proved the concept here. The protests at these kinds of accusations rings hollow. This has been their bread and butter argument since time immemorial. They should be very familiar and I would have thought that the pioneers of these tactics would be better at responding to them.
- Surely Zane DeSilva could have done better than this:
"If the Opposition is going to pick on the Government over contracts not put to tender, let me name a few others. The Rugby Classic. The Philadelphia Triathlon. The Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. All of these were sole sourced by this Government. Why aren't they objecting that these haven't gone to tender? "
Um? Huh? The World Rugby Classic? The Philadelphia Triathalon and the Yacht Club (Gold Cup?)? Let me get this right? 3 events which the Department of Tourism decided to sponsor (not source) are examples of non-bid contracts?
What the hell. Let's do this.
As usual he's got it backwards. These 3 examples are events created by private entities and Tourism was offered the chance to support them as they benefit Bermuda.
If the Department of Tourism created these events and asked The Rugby Classic, or Philadelphia Companies (subsidiary of Tokio Marine) or The Gold Cup sailing to sponsor, then he could make this claim. But of course they didn't. These were brought to Tourism. Those three entities are event organisers, not service providers.
Which of course means that Zane Desilva couldn't come up with one example of a legitimate 'sole-sourced' (ie. non tendered) contract, he had to fabricate them.
