Dear Sir,

In Ms Goring-Nozza’s rebuttal (Online Forum, I don’t understand the arithmetic, 3 Sept 2009) it is apparent that she does not understand the implications of her position, which appears to be that the government is responsible for hiring any Caymanian that is unable to immediately find a job in the private sector and then to keep them employed indefinitely on the government payroll. I’m not sure if she has ever travelled outside of the Cayman Islands, or she would realise that it is not the role of government to employ its citizens in order to keep the unemployment figures low. So on the one hand she has castigated the government for “wasteful spending”, but then insists that no Caymanian ever be let go from the civil service, regardless of their performance or whether or not the position is actually needed. I would also venture that she probably sees no problem in the fact that government employees receive pensions more than double that received in the private sector, or free health care.

I would encourage Ms Goring-Nozza to read Dr Look Loy’s recent commentary (The old boss versus the new boss, 3 Sept 2009) where he discusses various abuses in government funding and suggests that the Dept of Parks and Cemeteries be abolished, amongst other things. According to Ms Goring-Nozza’s argument, Dr Look Loy may also be labelled unpatriotic for daring to suggest that the government needs to cut back.

I would also point out statements attributed to the current Minister of Education in the recent Cayman Net News article ‘Minister appoints committee to oversee government scholarships’: “Mr Anglin called management of the programme a ‘picture of neglect’ by the previous Government, and worried that Caymanian students would prove unemployable because of their ‘alarmingly low’ academic performance.”

So here is another example of a high cost government programme ($9.5 million), apparently poorly managed and with no accountability by either the Ministry or the students themselves. But the government’s solution, it seems, is to send warning letters to the students, which begs the question, would they actually follow this up with the withdrawal of funding from those students who do not maintain a certain grade average?

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic (a convenient label when she could simply say that she doesn’t agree), I would argue that these funds, desperately needed elsewhere, could be put to better use should the programme and results not improve dramatically.

Name-calling, labeling and telling others to “shut up” (see Letter: Organising for Cayman #2, 2 Sept 2009) are cheap tactics used by those who are either out of good ideas or have given up on trying to win the argument with sound reasoning. On the contrary, I would encourage everyone to speak up, whether they agree or not, and then trust the public to decide which ideas are best for the future of Cayman.

J. Smith