531 Leave of Absence Friday, August 24, 2007 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Friday, August 24, 2007 The House met at 10.00 a.m. PRAYERS [MR. SPEAKER in the Chair] LEAVE OF ABSENCE Mr. Speaker: Hon. Members, I have received communication from the hon. Lawrence Achong, Member of Parliament for Point Fortin, requesting leave of absence from today’s sitting of the House. The leave which the hon. Member seeks is granted. MEDICAL BOARD (AMDT.) BILL Bill to amend the Medical Board Act, Chap. 29:50, brought from the Senate. [The Minister of Health]; read the first time. PAPERS LAID 1. Annual audited financial statements of Trinidad Nitrogen Company Limited for the financial year ended December 31, 2006. [The Minister of Trade and Industry and Minister in the Ministry of Finance (Hon. Kenneth Valley)] To be referred to the Public Accounts (Enterprises) Committee. 2. The 29th Annual Report of the Ombudsman for the period January to December 31, 2006. [Hon. K. Valley] JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE REPORT DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID (DNA) BILL (Presentation) Dr. Adesh Nanan (Tabaquite): Mr. Speaker, I wish to present the report of the Joint Select Committee appointed to consider and report on the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) Bill, 2006. APPROPRIATION BILL (BUDGET) [Second Day] Order read for resuming adjourned debate on question [August 20, 2007]: That the Bill be now read a second time. Question again proposed. 532 Appropriation Bill (Budget) Friday, August 24, 2007 Mrs. Kamla Persad-Bissessar (Siparia): Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. After five and a half years of PNM governance, our country is precariously perched on the edge of an abyss of social and economic disaster. This Government has received the highest revenue levels in our nation's history and they have also spent more than any other government in our nation's history. They have spent more than $200,000 million at a rate of about $1 million per day. But our citizens are worse off today than they were five and a half years ago. This Government has consistently failed to deal with the critical problems facing our country and facing our citizens. So that after five and a half years of mismanagement, incompetence and dereliction of duty, today we witness the following: a substantial number of our citizens live in poverty and destitution whilst Government Ministers and their friends and family are smiling all the way to the bank. A large portion of our workforce has been humiliatingly reduced to being the working poor. The business sector has expressed a lack of confidence in the local business environment and is forced to compete on an uneven playing field. Worst of all, food prices continue to skyrocket at double-digit inflation rates, in spite of all Government's bleating and schemes about lowering food prices. The cost of housing is increasingly prohibitive as building materials and labour costs continue to soar. Citizens continue to live in fear of being raped, of being robbed, of being murdered, as crime continues unabated in spite of Government's A to Z of crime plans; from Anaconda to Zero Tolerance, accompanied by limping blimps. The education system continues to fail our children in spite of the billions squandered therein. Our health sector is in crisis with citizens unable to access basic health care. Our roads are congested and crammed, resulting in hours of traffic gridlock and loss of productive man-hours; indeed this very day for those making their way to the Parliament, we spent hours in gridlock, in traffic, on the highways, getting into Port of Spain. More than 70 per cent of households do not have an adequate supply of water, whilst WASA has spent over $8.5 billion in the five and a half years. Power outages are the order of the day as electrical resources are stretched by demand. Indeed, right here in the Parliament, during the last two sittings, budget day notwithstanding, we experienced power cuts. Flooding continues to be a common occurrence resulting in substantial property damage annually, because of poor drainage and watercourse maintenance, yet farmers 533 Appropriation Bill (Budget) Friday, August 24, 2007 get 49 cents and 50 cents and $100 compensation for crop damage. The economy continues to be polarized with increased dependence on the energy sector and a widening non-oil fiscal deficit, in the face of volatile output and prices in the energy sector. Our agricultural sector continues to contract as farmers are forced out of the sector because of Government's neglect. High inflation caused by Government's excessive spending has resulted in higher borrowing costs. The environment is under serious threat from proposed Government projects. The administration of justice has been severely brutalized and compromised. The country is perceived as being increasingly corrupt according to the international indicators. Instead of institutional strengthening in the public sector, institutional weakening and destruction is the modus operandi of this Government. These are the problems affecting the standard of living of our citizens and the quality and substance of our lives. A responsible and caring government would have addressed these priority issues in his budget. Instead, what did we see? What did we hear? The 2008 Budget is nothing more than a feeble, lackluster political attempt to deflect public pressure for the Prime Minister's constant failure to deal with people's issues. And so I ask, Mr. Speaker, where is the love? Where is the love, hon. Prime Minister? Where is the love? I need to remind you, as the song says, "that people cannot make love on hungry belly". [Desk thumping] So when you tell us this is a love thing, I ask, where is the love? The Prime Minister does not understand that a country and its people progress only through sustained programmes for development and prosperity. Such programmes must provide every citizen with a sense of security and well-being, with equality of treatment, equality of opportunity to benefit from the exploitation and development of the country's resources. The Prime Minister does not understand or does not want to understand that a country cannot develop with a burst of feverish frenetic activity, predicated on broken promises in the closing weeks of the life of a government. It is a gross insult therefore, to the intelligence of the people of Trinidad and Tobago, for the Prime Minister to try to deceive us in what I term his swansong budget statement, with reruns of broken promises, of airy-fairy projects and grandiose plans in the dying weeks of his tenure as Prime Minister. [Desk thumping] It is a gross insult to the intelligence of the people of Trinidad and Tobago to find Ministers obscenely falling over each other in the last weeks of their life in government, repeating their broken promises to provide water, roads, transport, 534 Appropriation Bill (Budget) Friday, August 24, 2007 [MRS. PERSAD-BISSESSAR] housing, health care, education, schools, police stations, affordable food, agriculture and everything under the sun, including national security. It is a gross insult to the intelligence of the people for the Prime Minister to present, yet again, a series of rehashed promises, inadequate prescriptions and an abundance of deliberate misleading statements and embellishments of the truth. In these circumstances, hon. Speaker, I call on all right-thinking citizens to reject these contemptuous and futile attempts, at pre-election pacification, in the face of the reality that this Government has become irrevocably brutal, reckless and irresponsible, and is guilty of perpetrating the most heinous, abusive and offensive assaults on the lives and livelihoods of our citizens. [Desk thumping] Today, therefore, I make no recommendations to this Government. We all know they know not what to do, they know not what they do, nor do they listen. They have stuffed up their ears so they do not hear the cries of the people; of the fathers; of the mothers and the children of our nation. So, I warn them in the words of Proverbs 21:13: "If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered". So, today I make no recommendations to the Government; we have done that before. Instead, in our contributions today, as I lead off, we intend to highlight the critical issues of the day and the failure of the Prime Minister and his Government to address them. Further, as the alternative government, I intend to share with you some of the measures the UNC Alliance will pursue to take our country and our people forward when we form the next government. [Desk thumping] Last year, Mr. Speaker, in my budget contribution, as we looked at the macro- economy, I had warned that this Government has lost its way; that it was mismanaging our finances; that it did not care about the people of the nation. I say now, having lost its way, the Government became confused, and in their confusion, they have become increasingly reckless and irresponsible, so much so that there is no hope or salvation for them. This recklessness and irresponsibility is manifested in the fact that in a time of excess demand, in an inflationary environment, the Prime Minister has expanded budgeted expenditure by $3,000 million over last year. Such excessive expenditure comes at a time of shortage and structural constraints and represents the height of irresponsibility to the citizenry. Government's presence in the competitive marketplace has already had a significant effect on both price and availability of resources. And so the proposed 535 Appropriation Bill (Budget) Friday, August 24, 2007 substantial injection will further entrench Government's position at the expense of the other players in the country, including the business community.