Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine says that if re-elect­ed on Jan­u­ary 12, his ad­min­is­tra­tion will move ear­ly in the new year to take the is­sue of To­ba­go au­ton­o­my to an is­land-wide ref­er­en­dum.

Au­gus­tine is al­so call­ing on cen­tral gov­ern­ment to re­spect and im­ple­ment the out­come of that vote, warn­ing that fail­ure to do so would see To­bag­o­ni­ans mo­bilise and march to Port-of-Spain to de­mand that the will of the is­land be ho­n­oured.

Speak­ing in Buc­coo on Thurs­day night at a To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP) po­lit­i­cal meet­ing, Au­gus­tine out­lined what he de­scribed as a “blue­print” for To­ba­go’s de­vel­op­ment, with au­ton­o­my at its core.

“One of the things you will see when our blue­print is launched is that it will con­tain pro­pos­als for a ref­er­en­dum here in To­ba­go,” Au­gus­tine said. “We will be ask­ing the cen­tral gov­ern­ment to au­tho­rise, through law, a ref­er­en­dum so that the en­tire is­land can come out and vote and set­tle the is­sue of our au­ton­o­my once and for all.

“Every adult To­bag­on­ian will have one vote on the mat­ter. You vote, and what­ev­er you de­cide, that is what we go with,” he added.

Au­gus­tine warned, how­ev­er, that if cen­tral gov­ern­ment failed to ho­n­our the out­come, fur­ther ac­tion would fol­low.

“If the cen­tral gov­ern­ment is re­luc­tant to make le­gal pro­vi­sion for an as­sem­bly, we will hold a non-bind­ing ref­er­en­dum,” he said. “We will take the da­ta and the re­sults from that ref­er­en­dum and march for­ward to Port of Spain and say: this is what the peo­ple of To­ba­go want, and we want noth­ing less than that.”

He al­so lament­ed that To­ba­go cur­rent­ly has no au­thor­i­ty to cre­ate laws gov­ern­ing its mar­itime space, in­sist­ing that any au­ton­o­my leg­is­la­tion must ad­dress that is­sue.

“When we talk about au­ton­o­my, we are not ac­cept­ing any au­ton­o­my bills where we can’t pass laws for our ocean,” Au­gus­tine said. “That is ours. It doesn’t be­long to any­body else but us.”

He added that To­ba­go must have au­thor­i­ty be­yond the mar­itime bound­ary.

“Let them pass laws for the Gulf of Paria, for the port in Port-of-Spain, for To­co,” he said. “But once you cross the me­di­an line, the au­thor­i­ty must rest with the peo­ple of To­ba­go. To­ba­go is we, and we are not giv­ing that up to any­body.”

Au­gus­tine said the TPP, un­der his lead­er­ship, would not sup­port any au­ton­o­my bill that failed to grant To­ba­go au­thor­i­ty over its mar­itime space.

“We are not ac­cept­ing it,” he said.

He said he would like the ref­er­en­dum to be held by “at least the mid­dle of the new cal­en­dar year.”

The Chief Sec­re­tary al­so crit­i­cised two au­ton­o­my bills laid in Par­lia­ment by the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion in 2024, say­ing they would not have giv­en To­ba­go any au­thor­i­ty or say in mat­ters of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty or in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions.