From Roy Travert.
JERSEY will be bankrupt within the next two years. Our expenses are outstripping our income. What are the reasons? The States of Jersey’s policy of Go for Growth and Spend, Spend, Spend.

Well, we will be as long as our States Members keep spending taxpayers’ money like it’s going out of fashion. The public have been telling them this for the past 20 years and it’s finally come home to haunt them.

Didn’t our government learn anything from the mistakes of New Labour. The UK is for all intents and purposes bankrupt. And who has to pay for the governments excess? That’s correct, the taxpayers once again. Well I have some bad news, Jersey is on the verge of exactly the same situation.

I have no doubt that Jersey is in its worst financial position in living memory. And it’s us the taxpayers who will be forking out again for the States’ financial mismanagement and incompetence.

Will the fact that Fiscal Policy Panel chairman Joly Dixon told Senator Ozouf to curb the States’ excessive spending be listened to? What the panel had to say is very disturbing. Mr Dixon states that even after the recession ends, the States’ deficit will still remain and that is down to the inability of the States to stop spending on grandiose projects. I warned people of this fact when I stood for election in 2005 and in several letters to your paper.

Senator Ozouf appears to be stumbling from one bad financial decision to another and is now in the process of taxing us more to pay for them. GST, emissions tax, carbon tax, sewage tax, refuse tax, alcohol tax, you name it, they are going to tax us for it.

People are losing their jobs from our States-owned utility companies so that the States and the shareholders can enjoy the extra revenue from shares and profits that this will bring them. So they can spend more, again. It is as morally bankrupt as our financial position.

Senator Ozouf’s three-year spending limits should not be introduced under any circumstances. It is bad enough knowing we are going to be entering into a period of economic deficit, but quite another in not being able to respond quickly enough to stop the deficit getting worse if we need to.

Introducing a three-year limit will only hide the problem of over spends and increase the deficit without the public knowing about it. Or maybe that’s the idea?

Although Senator Ozouf has introduced an economic stimulus package, it is questionable if this is having the desired effects. It is now absolutely critical to control States’ spending to get Jersey’s budget back into balance and ward off the possibility of the States having to borrow money to prop up our finances.

And I’m afraid lip service and political spin applied to the problem by the Treasury Minister will not cut it with the tax-paying public any more. A true politician is not one who fears change, but one who causes it to happen.

Now that the facts have been established, the electorate of Jersey want results and change, with real savings made instead of increased taxation and overspends.