“Speaker appears to make pitch for MP’s raises” – The Nassau Guardian

Excerpt from this article; “Stopping short of calling for an increase for parliamentarians, Speaker of the House Halson Moultrie said yesterday that no one would sign up for a job agreeing to have his salary frozen.

‘Politicians make colossal personal sacrifices as well as financial ones,’ said Moultrie, as he addressed Parliament during the morning sitting.’

Moultrie raised the issue in the middle of a tribute in honor of former House Speaker the late Sir Arlington Butler, who died last Thursday.

‘There is an argument today that politicians knowingly sign up for the salary being offered,’ Moultrie said.

‘What is flawed about this argument is that every employee knowingly signed up for the salary they were being offered at the time of engagement, notwithstanding no one who has just started work would agree to have their salary scales frozen for more than 30 years.”

Now while this may be true what Mr. Moultrie must realize is that the long and short of it all is that it is insensitive for the government to even suggest it needs a raise and that at its first opportunity it will give itself one.  If we were to follow House Speaker Moultrie’s logic, then it would be the employers suggesting a raise, the people.

It is an insensitive suggestion as the government goes about the ‘painful’ exercise of ‘right sizing’ the civil service –cutting unnecessary jobs in order to decrease public expenditure because no matter how necessary the exercise; it may even be welcomed by some that understand our current situation, the long of short of it all is that the government is sending more persons to the unemployment line; these people are probably people already catching ‘internal hell’ and are now left defenseless to catch this ‘internal hell’.

A more sensitive government would instead of looking to give itself a pay increase find a way to put these monies into unemployment benefits because at this point in time there are persons that require the assistant much more than you, then as you grow the economy then ask the people of the country to assess your performance and ask for a raise.

Of course this will not be an easy task, as person have come not to trust governments but you must realize that this move to increase the pay of parliamentarian while citizens cannot even find jobs will only make person trust governments that much less.

As I make this commentary on what can only be described as insensitive behavior by the Free National Movement ((FNM) government, I must caution members of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) party as they seek to criticize the current government on this issue, as they were the ones that put it in play; no one knows what would have come to pass if they had actually won the 2017 general election. Then I must also caution them as a whole, as they seek to criticize the current administration with statements such as; “The Free National Movement thinks too much about statistics and figures and not enough about people,” PLP Chairman Fred Mitchell; is the chairman of the PLP suggesting that we should allow the whole to suffer in order to comfort the few?

Indeed, the current situation is a very difficult one brought about by decades of neglect and abuse of the public sector by both parties but can the Progressive Liberal Party honestly say that what is being done at this very moment is not necessary to correct this abuse, while they attempt to make a case for an uncaring government which it seems that the Free National Movement is to happy to help them with the recommendation for a pay increase at the most inopportune time.

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