Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Faris Al-Rawi is cer­tain aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures are in the up­com­ing 2012/2013 na­tion­al bud­get be­cause of gov­ern­ment's in­abil­i­ty to state where rev­enue will come from to sup­port its spend­ing. Speak­ing to the Guardian at an event of the Ba­hami­an con­sulate at the cham­ber of com­merce build­ing in West­moor­ings last Tues­day evening, Al-Rawi said, "The up­com­ing bud­get is per­haps one of the most im­por­tant events in this par­tic­u­lar cal­en­dar year. It rep­re­sents the third bud­get un­der this gov­ern­ment and it is a bud­get which has to speak to very im­por­tant par­tic­u­lars.

"This bud­get rep­re­sents a con­tin­u­a­tion of deficit bud­gets. Run­ning a deficit bud­get is not in and of it­self an is­sue, if you have a stat­ed ex­it plan and im­por­tant­ly, if you have par­tic­u­lars with re­spect to rev­enue gen­er­a­tion, and al­so if you have par­tic­u­lars with re­spect to deficit fi­nanc­ing.

"What is of ex­treme con­cern is where is the rev­enue com­ing from, and how is the deficit fi­nanc­ing be­ing dealt with, and what is the fu­ture tra­jec­to­ry with re­spect to deficit bud­gets. How much longer are we go­ing to run the cy­cle? Where do we get off the train? And that's par­tic­u­lar­ly so in the con­text of hav­ing raised the ceil­ing lim­it for our debts and guar­an­tees of com­pa­nies and oth­er par­tic­u­lars by $31.8 or $33.8 bil­lion.

"It means you've got a blank cheque book on a large over­draft ac­count and you're writ­ing cheques and you don't have a state­ment as to how you're go­ing to pay it back just yet. So the risk man­age­ment of that deficit item is the crit­i­cal mark­er to be look­ing at in this bud­get. "You've seen the pre­cur­sor state­ments by new min­is­ter of fi­nance, Mr (Lar­ry) Howai, say­ing there's no mag­ic wand, etc.

The cry has to be, how­ev­er, 'Where is your rev­enue gen­er­a­tion?' We can't come with the old state­ments of just sim­ply say­ing, 'Well, we'll work that out,' and, 'What an en­tre­pre­neur­ial so­ci­ety!' and, 'We'll cre­ate new spaces.' I mean, re­spect­ful­ly, that just won't hack it.

"The Pres­i­dent asked last year, in his last throne speech, 'Where was the next big tick­et rev­enue item?' and that big tick­et rev­enue item, he asked, was where was that to re­place the alu­minum smelter and oth­er in­dus­tries. "We heard this gov­ern­ment say, when it was in op­po­si­tion, that we're a plan­ta­tion econ­o­my with re­spect to en­er­gy, an 'en­er­gy plan­ta­tion econ­o­my' and that we had to move away from it, but they so glibly threw away items, that you must ex­pect aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures to now creep in­to the bud­get, so I will not be sur­prised if there has to be a man­age­ment through aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures in ad­just­ing the sub­sidy items in the bud­get.

The bot­tom line is, you can't con­tin­ue to ex­pend, ex­pend, ex­pend, with­out your rev­enue state­ment, and you cer­tain­ly can't be ir­re­spon­si­ble and just leave it for af­ter your five years. Some loans, we've not­ed, have been put on­to the books. There is a mora­to­ri­um in re­spect of it, and the pay­ments are to come af­ter this gov­ern­ment's five-year term, so it's a very crit­i­cal bud­get. It's one that the en­tire na­tion needs to pay at­ten­tion to, and that we have to have a crit­i­cal analy­sis on.

"Re­gret­tably, bud­get state­ments don't pro­vide the kind of analy­sis, be­cause you are pre­sent­ed with thou­sands of pages of doc­u­ments overnight; a bud­get speech com­mences; the ac­count­ing firms rush out to give a per­spec­tive, so it's done in a very in­op­por­tune way to en­cour­age prop­er de­bate, so we're con­fined to big state­ment iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, and one of those re­al big state­ments is where's my rev­enue, how much deficit, when is it be­ing re-paid, how does the coun­try af­ford it, what are our aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures.

"The gov­ern­ment has not curbed ex­pen­di­ture. It's giv­en tax hol­i­days in re­spect of prop­er­ty tax­es. Prop­er­ty tax­es are go­ing to come back up. They didn't tell the pop­u­la­tion that they reval­ued the en­tire prop­er­ty list­ing. There­fore you're go­ing to be pay­ing a per­cent­age of a high­er, re-as­sessed prop­er­ty val­ue. The last po­si­tion, if I re­call, laid in the par­lia­ment, which was with­drawn when we point­ed it out, was 7 per cent, so the coun­try axed the tax but is now prob­a­bly go­ing to get 7 per cent of raised val­ues.

"They are go­ing to have to eat those words about ax­ing the tax, and you know what, the prob­lem is not the tax­a­tion item. The prob­lem is the ir­re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing de­monised tax­a­tion. There is the old say­ing, 'There are two in­evitabil­i­ties in life: death and tax­a­tion.' You have to pay your tax­es.

The cit­i­zens de­mand that you get val­ue for mon­ey, through re­spon­si­ble mea­sures that you can see, but you can­not ever de­mo­nize the con­cept of tax­a­tion. It is what runs this coun­try. Whether it is pe­tro­le­um tax­es, or cor­po­ra­tion tax­es or in­come tax­es or prop­er­ty tax­es, you have to pay your fair share."

Asked how sure he was about aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures in this year's na­tion­al bud­get, he said, "If it doesn't come, I'd be ex­treme­ly sur­prised. "You see, it is an holis­tic ap­pre­ci­a­tion, you have to have. If you don't have the over­all struc­ture, you're go­ing to be in trou­ble. So it can't be sin­gled out to say you must have it, and it's good. It's in the con­text of where your tra­jec­to­ry is, what is your over­all deficit, how do you pay it back.

"If you look at the Unit­ed States ex­pe­ri­ence then you're look­ing at how deficit man­age­ment be­comes a re­al is­sue. So you're look­ing at the Unit­ed States, and you're see­ing the whole con­cept of deficit man­age­ment, of a tril­lion-dol­lar deficit. "So you can't sin­gle it out. You have to put it in the con­text, and on­ly in that over­all con­text can we re­al­ly ap­pre­ci­ate the fac­tor, be­cause no one item by it­self can stand alone in a na­tion­al bud­get state­ment."

Asked what the coun­try needs to see in a bud­get, he said, "The coun­try needs to see sol­id con­fi­dence demon­strat­ed in the bud­get. To do that, you have to have a state­ment as to how you are go­ing to spend, and how quick­ly, and in­to what projects you're go­ing to pour your Pub­lic Ser­vice In­vest­ment Pro­gramme (PSIP) spend­ing.

"In an econ­o­my where you have three sec­tors, the con­sumer sec­tor, the pri­vate sec­tor, and the gov­ern­ment sec­tor, in an en­vi­ron­ment like this one, lo­cal­ly and glob­al­ly, the gov­ern­ment sec­tor is the leader, so we have to see ag­gres­sive, cer­tain, val­ue-for-mon­ey spend­ing of the PSIP with trans­paren­cy.

"An ex­am­ple of no trans­paren­cy is the high­way to Point Fortin. An ex­am­ple of a bad man­age­ment of gov­ern­ment re­sources is that very high­way. You need to move away from ex­am­ples like that. You need to have prop­er state­ments, so the PSIP spend­ing is go­ing to be crit­i­cal. The sec­ond fac­tor is where is your rev­enue com­ing from in terms of di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, and what is the dif­fer­ence that Trinidad and To­ba­go of­fers to in­vestors in our pri­ma­ry prod­uct man­age­ment, and that is the en­er­gy sec­tor.

"So, 'Why should any­body come and in­vest here?' is the gold­en ques­tion. What makes us dif­fer­ent? Is it roy­al­ties and tax­es in re­spect of pe­tro­le­um and nat­ur­al gas? Is it the fact that we have a com­modi­ties mar­ket on the is­land which will there­fore en­cour­age you to go and spend mon­ey in deep­wa­ter in­ves­ti­ga­tion to bring gas an oil on­shore? Where do we demon­strate our dif­fer­ence in terms of com­pet­i­tive­ness to tell the world, 'Come and in­vest here'?"