It's that time of the year again - when everyone would speculate how much the COLA adjustment is going tobe or how much government subsidies will increase etc. However the budget speech was not intended to be the PR exercise it has rendered itself during the past years, where the people would stay glued to their TV sets to see how many crumbs will fall off the table. The budget speech should be an exercise where the Minister responsible for our money, (funds that we contribute from our hard-earned income) gives an estimation of how these funds will be allocated to the different public sectors.
One of these sectors is Local Government i.e. local councils. The mantra that the government truly believes in local councils and is heavily investing in them is repeated ad nauseam. In this article, we will probe this statement and whether the government is putting the money where its mouth is.
I analysed the budgetary estimates of every budget from 2008 onwards. Estimated allocations towards local councils were divided by the Gross National Product (GDP) of each respective year so that a percentage of this "national cake" results. In other words, I calculated how large was the slice of cake allocated to local councils, year on year.
It resulted that between 2008 and 2013 (the final 5 years of Nationalist governments), the portion of expenditure on local councils was on the rise but this trend was reversed from 2014 onwards. In fact, these statistics range from 0.51% to 0.43% during PN governments and from 0.43% to 0.33% during PL governments. The allocation floor of Nationalist administration was the allocation ceiling of their Labour counterparts. Therefore with this evidence, we can safely say that the PL does not really believe in local councils and in their potential. A government that believes in local councils would allocate more resources rather than less!
We can only hope that on Monday, the Minister would estimate a significant rise in the allocation of Local Government however their track record speaks for itself. On the other hand, we can rest assured that there is a political party that still believes in local councils - the Nationalist Party, and if the party follows its past track record in this sector, I'm sure that once it is responsible for the nation's finances, it will unleash the potential of local councils.
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