Senator Darcy Boyce will break his silence tonight at 7.30PM (VOB Radio). The hosting of a Press Conference at this time when most people expected that the Budget was imminent has come as a surprise to BU. Does it mean that the budget will be further delayed? Perhaps this is an attempt to do some damage control given the recent gaffe by Senator Jepter ‘physical deficit’ Ince. The rise of Boyce over Estwick is also an interesting side issue. We will find out shortly.
To kick off the discussion a recent comment by Conrad should do the trick:
I don’t know how to express this idea properly. It will come across as knocking the government, but if anyone in the government party were to really reflect on it, they will see I am trying to find them a way out before it is too late.
The DLP is a party with a proud tradition for bold policy and honest communication. But it has got itself unnecessarily caught up into a position where it no longer views Government as finding solutions to problems as it did in the 1960s and 1980s, but merely as political point scoring. Political point scoring is the job of opposition and they found one of the best in Hartley Henry at doing it. He is the consummate professional at political point scoring. But he has nothing to offer real, hard, economic problems. Faced with tough economic problems the Government’s response is not to find policy solutions, but to score political points.
Stuart’s contributions is not to float some new ideas or finding ways to communicate the problem to the people, but to say to people “Guard your minds” or “lets not be distracted by people worrying about the present lest we forget about the mismanagement of the past”. These are nice political strokes, but they actually make it harder for the government to actually address real problems, because the political position is that there aren’t problems they can do anything about.
The DLP’s Faustian Bargain with Hartley Henry is that they get into office, but they have no economic solutions to tough economic problems, because Hartley is not about economic policy, indeed, part of his anti-Owen message was an anti-intellectualism and that Owen viewed the society as an economy not a society.
There is no reason why it should be this way. Henrism was merely a device to win power, but the hubris of victory seduced DLP strategists into thinking that Henrism was more than just a political campaign but was actually a coherent set of ideas. It is not. It is an empty vessel when it comes to economic policy making. Economics isn’t everything, it is nothing without societal objectives, but to do away with economic ideas at a time like this and rely upon buffoons like Ince is dangerous. It is like having a heart operation but saying that because doctors make lots of mistakes we will do it ourselves using our home-bred, god-fearing, commonsense….
The DLP old guard must deject Henry’s anti-intellectualism and become once more the party of ideas. We have a Government caught in the headlights, frozen, and unable to do anything, hiding behind the fig leaf of it is a big global problem and the last lot did a bad job. Two and a half years into our biggest economic challenges and the Government has no fresh, bold, economic ideas and all it can do is maintain that they do not need them. How can self-respecting DLP intellectuals support that? There is nothing intrinsically DLP about that position, it is Henrism, it is not Barrowism. The real choice the DLP have is not between a set of individual personalities, but between someone who stands for Government as Leading with bold economic ideas as Barrow did, or as Government as merely the exercise of power and patronage, with Paris at CBC and Ince at the Ministry etc. Sadly, Stuart seems to have planted himself in the second camp. Maclean and Sealy too. Who is in the first? Estwick? Sinckler? Where are they? What are they saying? Now is the time for them to make some speeches to set out a vision, because we cannot afford another year in the valley of the blind.
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