The One Bermuda Alliance was elected to office based in part on promises to restore order and a sense of fiscal responsibility to our public spending. But almost two years on, the Island’s debt remains the gargantuan white elephant stampeding around the room.

The debt now stands at more than $2.1 billion and is rising every day. The proliferation of Government services, programmes and jobs in recent decades is now as costly to maintain as it is manifestly unsustainable given our straitened economic conditions.

With approximately 20 per cent of Bermuda’s labour force employed in the public sector, even meeting the Government payroll is becoming an increasing challenge.

Anaemic economic growth limits Government’s revenue-raising options and the ability to fund public sector spending.

It’s true that new infrastructure investment in the hospitality sector is imminent as a result of Bermuda securing hosting rights to the 2017 America’s Cup. This will result in an almost immediate knock-on effect in construction and its satellite industries. And, ultimately, tourism-related businesses ranging from retail to restaurants to taxis will also benefit.

But any meaningful recovery in these key domestic sectors of the economy is likely at least a year away.

Nor can Government count on the kind of runaway growth the offshore sector and its satellite industries experienced in the 1980s, ‘90s and early 21st century to fund spending, let alone to restore the Island’s fortunes.

Consolidation rather than expansion is the order of the day in the re/insurance industry, the chief driver of the international sector, and the ongoing wave of mergers and acquisitions is going to result in job losses and lost spillover economic activity in the short term.

As a result of the Island’s ongoing economic stagnation, Government is also finding it more and more difficult to persuade international credit-rating agencies that Bermuda has a credible plan in place to balance the books.

So borrowing has become increasingly difficult and costly. Every penny we borrow has to be paid back, with interest, and Bermuda no longer looks like the sure bet it once was to international lending agencies.

Government has so far avoided the kind of harsh austerity measures which have become increasingly commonplace in other jurisdictions.

While it is fast becoming accepted that the old jobs-for-life civil service culture is becoming a thing of the past in Bermuda (even among public sector employees), there have been no wholesale reductions in staffing levels.

Pay freezes have been substituted for pay cuts, furlough days for layoffs.

This week’s stand-offs between Government and public sector employees about the enforced monthly leaves of absence are impressive exercises in street theatre but not perhaps the most constructive method of pursuing collective bargaining negotiations. Nor to win public support for their cause.

The latest disruptions to public services, including schools, ferries and buses, has inconvenienced and angered thousands of residents.

Patience is wearing extremely thin with Government employees whose livelihoods escaped the worst ravages of the destabilising economic contraction which resulted from a worldwide downturn combined with domestic fiscal and immigration policies bordering on the criminally negligent.

Those whose tax dollars underwrite public sector pay cheques are also growing impatient with a Government which still spends too much, borrows too much, taxes too much and economises far, far too little.

It should be borne in mind that everyone who works in the public sector is also a taxpayer as well as a consumer of public services. Many of them also believe that public funds are being badly spent; after all, they are eyewitnesses to inefficiency every day.

Government would do well not to confuse the self-serving declarations of public sector unions with the feelings of the actual workforce. But, of course, both of Bermuda’s political parties are so deathly afraid of alarming public sector employees — all of them potential voters — who might feel threatened by talk of genuine and necessary structural reforms to the civil service that they opt to continue talking around the subject.

Which is why the findings of the blue-ribbon Spending and Government Efficiency Commission have gone entirely ignored (including, of course, a recommendation to reduce the size of Bermuda’s top-heavy Parliament, a case study in wastefulness and excess).

Created with a specific mandate to recommend ways we could “streamline Government processes, including quangos, improve delivery of services and make Government more efficient, more cost-effective, more transparent and more user-friendly”, the OBA appears to have filed and completely forgotten SAGE’s final report.

Instead Government is continuing to indulge the white elephant in the room. And, frankly, we can no longer afford the peanuts.