Senior Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Chris Sinckler is defending Government’s financial management practices while emphasising the need for flexibility.
Speaking in the Senate yesterday as debate on the Appropriation Bill, 2026 continued, he said he heard the “discourse about supplementaries that the Government brings every year” and that “transparency and accountability demand that the public financial managers say up front by presenting estimates or budgets for projects and programmes, what these will cost.”
The former Minister of Finance in a Democratic Labour Party administration after explaining the process of preparing the Estimates, told the Upper Chamber that memoranda contained at the front of the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure showed “quite clearly … the Government has met its fiscal targets, and that fiscal discipline is still very much the watchword”.
“The Government is no longer in IMF [International Monetary Fund] programme . . . . Those memoranda also tell you what is happening,” Sinckler said.
“The Government also has a committee in place with the private sector, with the unions – the Monitoring Committee – which has written on these things to say that the Government has met its fiscal targets. In fact, the Government has so met its fiscal targets that it has been able to have the fiscal room to do some other things, like bring the supplementaries, which came.
“And even in factoring those supplementaries in, the Government is still going to run a primary surplus of over three per cent. … I’m not going to be very difficult or hard, because I know public finance is sometimes boring, it is not sexy, it is not the fancy thing that you want, but in order to really engage, you have to read these things, because it is going to be important down the road to your understanding of how Government functions,” he said.
The Government Senator also spoke about the economic benefits of cultural investments arguing that “investment goes beyond money”.
“Be very careful to understand that there’s not only cost in terms of counting numbers, you also have to speak about the value of the input. I’m not getting into the CARIFESTA thing. If CARIFESTA in 1981 cost $23 million, I don’t know how anybody can expect in 2026 it’s going to cost $4 million.
“But the fact of the matter is, that yes, it costs, and that is a choice, because Government makes choices about what it’s going to invest in. But I’m telling you that when you think not just of the costs, and we have to give account, yes, we have to be transparent, yes, all of those good things. We also have to take into account the value of the investment in the young, in the cultural artists, in the not-so-young, the artists and the artistes. And when you look at the multiplier effect, and there will be a report on this to show the impact of it,” said the minister. (GBM)
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