Richard Lord

Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley is de­scrib­ing as "clich�", the $49 bil­lion bud­get pre­sent­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day. He said: "My first re­ac­tion is that the pre­sen­ta­tion was ex­treme­ly dis­ap­point­ing. It was very mun­dane. "It was very pedes­tri­an and it sim­ply was a re­hash of the cliched pro­pos­als of pre­vi­ous bud­gets." He said the on­ly de­fin­i­tive mea­sures list­ed in the pre­sen­ta­tion were ini­tia­tives to ad­dress the Cli­co and Hin­du Cred­it Union fi­nan­cial crises and the changes to the Mo­tor Ve­hi­cle De­part­ment. He said the oth­er mea­sures did not point to any change tak­ing place in T&T as was promised by the new Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment.

"The bud­get promised a lot and de­liv­ered very lit­tle. There was noth­ing new there," Row­ley added. He said many of the an­nounced mea­sures, in­clud­ing putting the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion (UTC) un­der the man­age­ment of the Cen­tral Bank, al­ready were es­tab­lished or pro­posed as Gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy. "There was no change. There is no change to any­thing in T&T af­ter this bud­get. I ex­pect­ed there would be some­thing that would change our cir­cum­stances. This bud­get does not do it," Row­ley said. He said he would re­spond when the bud­get de­bate be­gins on Tues­day at 10 am.