The Tribune

HOW is your money being spent?

After all, money spent by the government is from the public purse – that’s the purse you put money into.

Well, never you mind if you want to know what’s being done with it, it seems.

Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell is not a man for telling the people how their money is being spent, it seems. When The Tribune dared to ask him last week about how much the trip to the coronation of King Charles III cost the country, he replied: “I do not ever comment on these matters.”

And yet, he appeared full of comment in a voice note on these matters.

He said that the trip involved “serious constitutional functions” and added that “we trivialise a serious purpose when you start picking apart on this or that matter as if the purpose and intent were not serious in London”.

No one said the trip was not serious – we just wanted to know how much it cost. We cannot know if we are getting value for money if we do not know how much money is involved.

Mr Mitchell also embroiled the leader of the Opposition in matters for, again, daring to raise the subject.

Michael Pintard was on board the plane that went to London and Mr Mitchell took him to task for wanting a full accounting of the cost of the trip. He said: “This is the same trip in which he [Pintard] was pictured in a full-tailored suit to see the king … if he had bought that suit that he was posing in when he went to see the king at public expense, that … was at least £1,000.”

Mr Mitchell called – and we are not sure if this is in his capacity as minister or PLP chairman – for both the PLP and the FNM to “exercise message discipline”, adding: “Sometimes, silence is golden.”

He also warned “how injurious it may look” to post on social media “features which portray a personal joy ride”. Who is he warning and who would be posting such features? Is that a warning to the leader of the Opposition?

Our country is part of the Commonwealth and has a Governor General as representative of the King in The Bahamas. Of course we were going to send a delegation – but the price tag should not be a secret.

Today, there is a training session being held for officers on the Freedom of Information Act – it certainly seems we are a long way from the idea of information being freely available if we cannot simply find out our leaders’ travel costs. Whether that total is good value or not is up to them to then justify. It might be perfectly reasonable. It might be living like an emperor on the public dollar. We don’t know, and some choose not to say.

This comes as questions swirl about the doubling in cost of the new prison plan and exactly how that contract process was decided – and over at the Central Bank, the bank is having to write off $9m of its funds after the decision to scrap the planned new headquarters. Those are bank funds rather than tax money – but what a waste.

One of the mistakes of the last PLP administration was that it failed to provide accountability and lost the public trust. That led to them being voted out in a landslide.

High-handedly dismissing calls to account for the cost of trips is one way to go about repeating the same errors – and shows any talk about transparency is just that. Talk.