The glob­al in­crease in the price of oil gave the coun­try an $8 bil­lion wind­fall.

Two mil­lion dol­lars of that was al­lo­cat­ed to the bud­get when the Gov­ern­ment pre­sent­ed the mid-year bud­get re­view, now the Prime Min­is­ter has some oth­er ideas of how the rest can be spent.

“I have just said that it is pos­si­ble for the gov­ern­ment to make half of the mon­ey we have avail­able from the in­creased earn­ings now, to make that avail­able to pub­lic ser­vants now but that will have to be with the agree­ment of their lead­ers,” Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said yes­ter­day.

He was speak­ing dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann’s when he made the of­fer.

Row­ley said if this of­fer is ac­cept­ed, it will bring the ne­go­ti­a­tions to an end much faster than the es­tab­lished pro­ce­dure.

He al­so took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­vite the Joint Trade Union Move­ment back to the Na­tion­al Tri­par­tite Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee (NTAC.)

“I would like to ap­peal to labour to re­turn to NTAC with­out pre-con­di­tions and the Gov­ern­ment would wel­come them back with­out pre-con­di­tions,” he said.

NTAC is an ad­vi­so­ry body that pro­vides tech­ni­cal ad­vice to the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment and it is made up of rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Gov­ern­ment, trade unions and the pri­vate sec­tor.

Sev­er­al days ago, JTUM gen­er­al sec­re­tary Michael An­nisette said the labour move­ment would not re­turn to NTAC.

“Un­til and un­less there’s a gen­uine at­tempt by this Gov­ern­ment to gen­uine­ly en­gage the labour move­ment in mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sions, we are not go­ing back there. We won’t be used as a PR stunt, right by this gov­ern­ment,” An­nisette said then.

Yes­ter­day, the Prime Min­is­ter said the Gov­ern­ment has al­so de­cid­ed on a pol­i­cy re­gard­ing the fu­el sub­sidy, which cur­rent­ly stands at ap­prox­i­mate­ly $300 mil­lion per month.

“We could set a cap on how much we are pre­pared to spend of the pub­lic earn­ings…we think $1B is a rea­son­able amount,” Row­ley said.

He said if the in­ter­na­tion­al oil price ris­es fur­ther, con­sumers will have to bear the brunt of the in­crease but if prices drop, cit­i­zens will ben­e­fit. Row­ley said the lat­est news out of the Unit­ed States showed fu­el prices were be­ing forcibly low­ered. He ex­pects this to im­pact the glob­al price of oil.

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so boast­ed that this coun­try’s in­fla­tion rate stands at 5 per cent, de­spite the fi­nan­cial im­pacts of the pan­dem­ic.

He said T&T was in a much bet­ter po­si­tion than many oth­er coun­tries around the world.

An­nounc­ing that this year’s bud­get would be pre­sent­ed ear­li­er than the usu­al Oc­to­ber date, the Prime Min­is­ter said the coun­try can al­so look for­ward to a full re­port from the Fi­nance Min­is­ter, Colm Im­bert on the coun­try’s fi­nan­cial po­si­tion on Sep­tem­ber 2.