Government's Medium Term Fiscal Strategy: A Case Of Being Economical With The Truth?

Barbados' PM/Finance Minister gave a rather testy reply last week (March 2, to be precise) at the Public-Private Sector Consultations, regarding the public availability of the government's Medium Term Fiscal Strategy (MTFS). He said then (see link of transcript), "This document was widely circulated more than 10 days ago - and therefore is no "secret" document that needed to fall of the back of a truck - is available for all to see, read, inwardly digest and comment on."

It has been a funny old goose chase to find this 'widely circulated' document. But, at long last, I and others have found where it is. It's now on the Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS) website (see link), available under 'Notices/'Press releases'. What is so funny (to my rather fastidious mind) is that, there, it says clearly:

Date Added:	March 4, 2010
Date Updated:	March 7, 2010

So, the place where many citizens would have expected to find the document, they would have come up with a huge zero on the day the PM told us that it was widely available--I had checked the website the week before, when Mr. Arthur made reference to the MTFS, and found not a trace, and I had check it following the PM's bold assertion and also found nothing there. Now, was the PM being a bit economical with the truth in saying the documents were 'widely available'? Again, I am not going to get into a semantic debate about what is meant by 'widely' and 'available'. But I think that any government document that one can find on a government information website only two days after saying that it is "widely available" does not meet the test of widely available, in these modern high tech times, at the time the statement was made. I'm no lawyer, so will bow to legal minds who can bend time backwards.

It would have been so graceful to have said, 'the documents will be made available on the government information website' shortly, or similar, but then that would have been an admission that wide availability had not yet been the order of the day.

Bringing people along with ideas is in part about letting them see what you say you want them to see and giving opportunities to comment that you say that you have offered. I would mark this exercise as yet another 'failing grade' on the show and tell the public scale.

I can see former US President, Abraham Lincoln, turning in his grave, and recalling his words: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."