In many ways, the bud­get is noth­ing more than a po­lit­i­cal doc­u­ment. It is a state­ment of in­tent by the gov­ern­ment of the day on how it is go­ing to spend mon­ey over the 12-month fis­cal year, and how it in­tends to raise rev­enue to pay for its ex­pen­di­ture.

This is now the 8th bud­get pre­sent­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert, and as we have be­come ac­cus­tomed, it does not point a way for­ward. In­stead, it seeks to mis­lead us in­to be­liev­ing that the gov­ern­ment is do­ing a great job in man­ag­ing the econ­o­my, and it does not im­part any strate­gic plan for the coun­try.

The clos­est we came to the un­der­stand­ing the gov­ern­ment’s thoughts on the fu­ture of the econ­o­my was the de­c­la­ra­tion that T&T will for a long time de­pend on the en­er­gy sec­tor and there­fore we need to fix the sec­tor.

I will be among the first to ad­mit that the en­er­gy sec­tor is cru­cial to the coun­try’s short- to medi­um-term out­look. It is why like many oth­er com­men­ta­tors, I have used this space to call on, and some­times call out the gov­ern­ment, on the need to stop the in­er­tia, the seem­ing paral­y­sis, and to act quick­ly to get the sec­tor go­ing again.

Be­tween 1998 and 2022 we have on­ly had two suc­cess­ful bid rounds, once in the Bas­deo Pan­day regime and the oth­er in the Per­sad-Bisses­sar gov­ern­ment.

All of the oth­er bid rounds have had lit­tle suc­cess, in­clud­ing the 2022 deep-wa­ter bid round.

The truth is, af­ter the un­for­tu­nate ar­rest of Er­ic Williams, the ap­point­ment of Dr Lenny Saith as Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, while still hold­ing the pow­er­ful port­fo­lio of Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, the ap­point­ment of Con­rad Enil, and the glob­al eco­nom­ic crash of 2008, and add to that the in­abil­i­ty of the late Franklin Khan to get things go­ing, and you can see why as a coun­try we are pay­ing the price of low oil and gas pro­duc­tion.

You can­not main­tain your pro­duc­tion with­out con­stant drilling, workovers, and ex­plo­ration. It just can­not be done. If you are not pro­vid­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties and hold­ing to ac­count com­pa­nies with acreage then it will not hap­pen, es­pe­cial­ly in a ma­ture basin as in T&T.

You have to walk a tightrope that recog­nis­es that gov­ern­ment must man­age and reg­u­late the sec­tor while at the same time un­der­stand­ing that this is a busi­ness in which com­pa­nies must make mon­ey in keep­ing with the kind of risk they are un­der­tak­ing.

It is why, fi­nal­ly, af­ter years of free ad­vice to this ad­min­is­tra­tion, that the coun­try’s fis­cal terms in the en­er­gy sec­tor have made it un­com­pet­i­tive, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance is mov­ing to make some of the changes that we all hope will lead to more in­vest­ment, a more eq­ui­table share of the take, and cre­ate a big­ger pie.

Im­bert told the Par­lia­ment, “Madam Speak­er, we are tak­ing a bal­anced ap­proach in de­ter­min­ing pos­si­ble changes to the coun­try’s oil and gas tax regime, as it per­tains to the up­stream en­er­gy sec­tor. To in­cen­tivise new pro­duc­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly new oil pro­duc­tion we have de­cid­ed in the first in­stance to ad­just our Sup­ple­men­tal Pe­tro­le­um Tax Regime to mo­ti­vate oil com­pa­nies to pro­duce more oil. Over the next 3 months, we will al­so be look­ing at ad­just­ments to oth­er en­er­gy tax­es, again to mo­ti­vate the oil com­pa­nies to in­crease pro­duc­tion.”

The Min­is­ter has said he does not lis­ten to many in the pub­lic square who of­fer the gov­ern­ment ad­vice but the re­al­i­ty is that our oil pro­duc­tion re­mains the low­est it has been since in­de­pen­dence and nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion is woe­ful­ly short of in­stalled ca­pac­i­ty. In short, the much-tout­ed wind­fall we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing is much low­er than we could have, had our pro­duc­tion not been so low.

T&T should not be buoyed by the im­proved rev­enue streams be­cause they seek to mask the re­al­i­ty of the low pro­duc­tion.

The re­cal­ci­trance of the gov­ern­ment to tak­ing good ad­vice, of­ten from the very peo­ple they ap­point to give them ad­vice, has re­al costs for the coun­try. It has been six years now that the Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Board and many oth­ers urged the gov­ern­ment to re­move the sub­si­dies on fu­el or at least cap it. The gov­ern­ment re­fused to do it. At that time crude prices were low and it would not have caused the kind of hard­ship that the present in­crease in fu­el prices will have. That does not mean I don’t sup­port the move. I have been on the record plead­ing with the gov­ern­ment to re­duce its heavy sub­si­dies bill and that changes to the fu­el prices were nec­es­sary since this was noth­ing but a re­gres­sive mea­sure that favours those with re­sources more than it does the poor.

The ques­tion that has to be asked is what could we as a coun­try done with the bil­lions we spend on sub­si­diz­ing gas prices over the years? As a coun­try, we have to make choic­es and we have to ask if a bil­lion dol­lars is bet­ter spent on sup­port­ing low fu­el prices or used to fix the trans­porta­tion woes, im­prove health care, or fix the road net­work.

For the Prime Min­is­ter and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance to now talk about the op­por­tu­ni­ty cost to the coun­try of the years of their own pol­i­cy po­si­tion is play­ing smart with fool­ish­ness.

So yes this is the right move and while it comes be­fore a prop­er pub­lic trans­porta­tion sys­tem and while there was no men­tion of this in the bud­get speech one has to hope the gov­ern­ment does what must be done to ex­pand the ca­pac­i­ty of the bus ser­vice and its ef­fi­cien­cy.

The space of this col­umn does not al­low us to deal with each mea­sure in de­tail but the fi­nal is­sue I want to raise to­day is the price pro­jec­tions of the bud­get. The Min­is­ter es­ti­mates that crude prices will av­er­age US $92.50 a bar­rel and gas at USD$6 an mmb­tu.

Now while we do not as a coun­try set prices and they are out of his hands and our re­al is­sue is on the pro­duc­tion side, these are the high­est prices ever used as the ba­sis for the bud­get. I hope they are re­alised but I fear that the re­al strat­e­gy of set­ting them so high is to avoid hav­ing to put any in­to the Her­itage and Sta­b­li­sa­tion fund as would be re­quired by law. If true it’s a cyn­i­cal ap­proach since it’s the very HSF that saved us in the pan­dem­ic.