There was a nice contrast between the budget speech and Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday’s reply to it, but sadly length wasn’t one of them.

The enormously long budget speech was curiously vague on many topics and even brief on some. Other than lists of fees, fines and duties, there were surprisingly few figures in it. The Finance Minister had very little to say about crime, for instance, and it didn’t come up until more than halfway through her three-hour speech. Some of what she said on the topic was ill-judged: the Government would not waver in its zero-tolerance posture, she intoned, without a trace of embarrassment. Mr Panday rightfully pounced on that on Friday-what zero tolerance?

This approach is actually set to begin on the roads, with increased penalties for traffic offences. That was among the few concrete measures in the budget, and was a popular one: people are really disturbed at the number of road deaths and the poor standard of driving.

Mr Panday misjudged his response to this one, missing the point-that the penalties are intended as a deterrent, and a sign that traffic offences are going to be taken more seriously. Instead he argued the increased penalties were a desperate attempt to scrape together more revenue: ’picking the pockets of motorists to fund squandermania,’ he called it.

He’d have done better to dwell for longer on property taxes, a real revenue-increasing measure and the one innovation in the budget that has caused widespread alarm and resentment.

Instead Mr Panday focused on corruption, in a strangely academic way. He cited numerous statistics from corruption indices. He recalled the PNM’s anti-corruption campaign, saying it had been abandoned once energy prices rose, when the Government realised it now had larger opportunities for corruption.

He could have given examples of projects that cost millions more than they should, of contractors who were overpaid or didn’t perform, of allegations made before the Uff Commission.

Instead he quoted Lincoln again-from ’200 years ago’-and listed incidents that might have been improper and counter-productive, but most of which wasn’t corrupt. There had been no Solicitor General for several years; the appointment of a Commissioner of Police and a Director of Public Prosecutions had been sabotaged; there had been attacks on a sitting Chief Justice; there were no answers to questions laid in Parliament.

Mr Panday also fell short of his target on the topic of crime, where you would have thought the Government was a sitting duck. He quoted a Latin proverb, of all things; he referred to a forgotten calypso by Cro Cro from 2004 that advocated kidnapping-which, oddly enough, and unfortunately for Mr Panday’s purposes, is probably the only category of crime that has declined in the past couple of years.

He was tired of stupid statements, public-relations promises, being scared every time his children went out that they might be killed or kidnapped or robbed. He didn’t sound scared, though; he just sounded tired.

His performance, though it included the occasional flash of wit or a dart of venom, was lacklustre. He didn’t seem to have read through his speech beforehand: he lost his place, he mispronounced words, he skipped bits towards the end. He was coughing so badly that you felt he should have been at home, tucked up in bed with a cup of tea.

In his last few minutes Mr Panday offered a concise but comprehensive counter-budget. Some of them were old ideas, some borrowed from the Government, but despite Information Minister Neil Parsanlal’s scoffing, that didn’t mean they weren’t good ideas. The Government had offered recycled measures too.

And at least you always knew what Mr Panday was saying, which was not the case with Ms Nunez-Tesheira’s jargon-packed epic. The day after her speech, for instance, she had to explain that she had meant to convey that the Government was not going ahead with the rapid rail project.

What she said in the budget speech was: ’In fiscal 2010, the final costing and scope of works for the project will be determined, thus allowing the Government to make an informed investment decision on the construction phase of the project.’ That suggests that the Government hasn’t made a decision yet, but is waiting for more information before it does so.

It’s worrying that the minister thought she was communicating one thing when her words said quite another; it makes you wonder where else she and her audience differ on what she said. It was a little disturbing, too, when she nonchalantly asked her colleagues whether a date she’d just given was correct. And when the Opposition protested something she said, she joked, ’They can’t take it, Mr Prime Minister, they can’t take it,’ as though this were a private conversation between her and her leader, and not a speech to the House and the country.

She was both smug and offhand, an odd combination considering that she was delivering a deficit budget with very little of the largesse that the population had become used to during the boom years. But nevertheless, the Finance Minister’s star is in the ascendant; unlike Mr Panday’s, which is plainly in decline.