SPEAKING for three hours and seven minutes in what was her historic presentation of a national budget in the House of Representatives yesterday, Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira broke the first rule she established going in. She had pledged not to deliver a lengthy address.

In a variety of much more fundamental ways, however, the Minister also presented a hefty package which promised, well, more of the same, and not sufficient in terms of setting the society and the economy on a critically needed new course.

As the Minister wound up her maiden presentation, her literature was a dead give-away about the Government’s real intentions. Freeness on a range of fronts as a means of satisfying a growing public thirst for material advancements. This itself has been driven by the Government’s own insistence on spending its way into a retention of office, at the expense of real economic growth, diversification and transformation.

Instead of pointing the society towards the search for new and alternative sources of fuel, for example, the Minister cast the nearly $50 billion package on a disappointing continuation of the dependence on the country’s oil and gas reserves.

This is not in keeping with an administration that talks, at times conveniently, about economic diversification and about sustainable development towards the achievement of First World status.

Having insisted on turning deaf ears to the sustained calls from almost every quarter in the society for it to control this urge to spend, the Government contributed significantly to the fact that its own targets on inflation control went a-begging again in the last fiscal year.

Where it had targeted an inflation ceiling of not more than seven per cent, the Government spent its way into an inflation rate which pushed past 12 per cent by the time yesterday’s Budget was under final preparation. With the onset of the fiscal year ahead of us, given the plans outlined by the Minister for more spending, there is no telling where the inflation rate will end up, even by the end of the next quarter.

One estimate puts transfers and subsidies at an alarming 40 per cent of GDP, an eye-opening development in an administration which continues to talk about fiscal discipline and responsibility.

Sure, Minister Nunez-Tesheira announced a fresh regime of measures meant to cushion the impact of the high and rising cost of living on the poor and the vulnerable. But this could hardly be considered as optional in a situation in which by its own continued actions it is helping to fuel those increases. At the end of the day, those increases in pensions and grants will hardly leave their recipients any better off than where they may be at the moment.

Instead of a statement which would have provided the country with the much-needed platform for a new take-off, an impetus for a new dynamism, this first female-delivered Budget leaves us with a dispiriting sense of too much deja vu.