Finance Minister Eugene Cox's call for departmental budget cuts of five percent.

Every Minister will be quick to explain how his or her portfolio is the most important to Bermuda and how any cuts will lead to disaster for the Island.

What is surprising is the fact that so many Ministers have been prepared to go public. The optimist may see this as part of the transparency and open government that was promised in the New Bermuda, but the sceptical will say that it indicates the degree of unease Ministers have with the handling of the upcoming Budget.

When the Progressive Labour Party was elected, it promised to find pockets of sloppiness and areas where taxes were not being collected properly as ways of holding down expenditure and taxes.

Not much has been heard on this since, but there has been plenty of evidence of spending, on travel, on expensive marketing efforts for the tourism and international businesses and on a host of other supplementary estimates -- which now total $15 million -- or more than one third of the projected current account surplus for the year.

On a case by case basis, some of these expenditures may be justified; if more money had to be set aside for the Y2K bug, then that was a reasonable expenditure.

But it also suggests that Ministers have been allowed to exceed their Budgets, and in spite of the land tax surprise, some of these are now well ahead of last year's estimates.

At the same time, yet another weak tourism year means tax revenue in that area is probably down.

Mr. Cox would have been wiser to look for specific areas of waste and overspending to cut. Why should the Police, which is undermanned now, be asked to make the same cuts as a department which is fully staffed but less, to use the latest techno-babble, mission-critical than law enforcement? It seems that Mr. Cox has rejected the idea of automating postal sorting which would save money and improve efficiency, apparently because of the job losses which would occur.

This will be the crunch in any efforts at Budget-cutting. Any real cuts will require either reduced services to the public, job losses among Government employees or both. Neither alternative will be particularly palatable to a labour government.

Nor is raising taxes by a significant degree a palatable alternative when Bermuda's competitiveness is already in question.

A still new Government faces the problem of meeting expectations and the Progressive Labour Party laid out an ambitious programme for the year in the Throne Speech.

But any responsible Government must live within its means; if some promises have to wait, or the size of Government needs to be reduced, then that is what the Government has to do, not because it is popular, but because it is the right.