WHAT a difference a year makes, Mr. Editor. Last year it was The Social Agenda. What? You forgot? Never mind. There's a new leader of the Progressive Labour Party Government this time around and he has promised to take Bermuda to the next level. Now it's called The Social Contract.

Words, Mr. Editor, just words, but plenty of them in this year's Budget Statement which was delivered last Friday in the House on the Hill by Finance Minister Paula Cox. It took her just over an hour and a half to read the Statement, some 45 pages long. I thought it might have been some kind of a record by local standards until I checked last year's copy. It was 51 pages long.

We all got to follow along with our copies of her Statement, although that might not have been the case for all of us in the House were it not for the timely intervention of the Speaker. It wasn't long after the Minister began reading that the Speaker, the Hon. Stanley Lowe, who had a copy, noticed that the Government members, backbenchers included, were following along with their respective copies, but the Opposition were without any.

Mr. Lowe interrupted.

"Excuse me Minister", he said, "but I notice neither the leader of the Opposition nor the Shadow Minister have copies."

The Sergeant at Arms was instructed to remedy the wrong - and he did - and in his enthusiasm, instituted welcome and overdue change. All of us in the Opposition were given copies of the Statement to follow along.

Nice copies they are too, Mr. Editor, lovely glossy booklets; but this year without the traditional 47 or so pages which have been included in the past and which provide short summaries of what is proposed in the Budget itself, which is actually known as the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure and is some 300-plus pages long.

I can't say with any certainty that the absence of the summaries was about cutting costs. If you look at the Budget - which we will on the Hill over the next couple of weeks - you will soon see that the PLP are just not into that: cutting back, on spending that is.

Besides they had the swivel servants down at the Department of Communication and Information also produce a mini-me look-alike glossy summary leaflet entitled "National Budget 2007/08", with a glossy photo of the Minister in the inside, and on the outside the words: "The Gold Standard: Growth. Equity. Well-being".

I think they are referring to Bermuda. But you can't be too sure. They might also be referring to themselves.

The plan is to raise $917 million in revenue this year, $61 million more than last year

(about 7 percent more, twice the rate of inflation), and they plan to spend it all, and then some. We moved from the millions, baby, past the billion mark, and into the hundreds of millions. No sweat.

There it was, Mr. Editor, just about in the middle of the Statement, the justification for why, and I quote: -

It seems, Mr. Editor, that you have to follow the money if you want to see what's in it for you ? or someone else as the case may be.

The commitment, according to the Minister, is to continue to strive to provide "innovative, helpful, useful and uplifting public programmes".

The Minister identified two: the recently opened Sylvia Richardson Care Facility in St. George's which was initially budgeted at $7-million and came in over $21-million; and the Berkeley Institute which started out with a budget of $75-million and currently stands at $128-million, and possibly still counting.

Commented the Minister -and I kid you not when I quote: "The new educational facilities for The Berkeley Institute are another magnificent example of the new standard."

You don't say: a new standard alright, but not in all the right ways.

A lot more was said - remember the Statement was over 40 pages and took over 90 minutes to read -but Shadow Minister Pat Gordon-Pamplin will deliver the official Reply for the Opposition today, and I'm just not into gazumping Pat, here or on the floor of the House on the Hill. She's my colleague.

But just a couple of more quick thoughts on the Budget before I leave off for this week:

The maintenance of law and good order, we were told, is essential for our stability and our economy. "What then?", cried out one wag on the Opposition benches, by way of a timely interpolation. "Bodyguards for everybody?"

No money is going to be set aside for housing this year, we were also told, because of "strategic linkages" Government has made with the private sector. "You can't be

serious", wondered Opposition Leader Wayne Furbert out loud, "if you're going to call that election".

The Statement also referred to the preliminary results of the Annual Employment Survey and how the overall number of jobs in Bermuda was provisionally placed at 39,611 in 2006, an increase of some 664 jobs from the year before. "Bermudians held 27,316 of these jobs or 7 out of every 10 jobs in our economy", read the Minister. That's some spin, Mr. Editor. What she didn't tell you is what we had to find out for ourselves in the 2006 Economic Review, a publication of the Ministry of Finance that is tabled and distributed after the Budget is presented. The summary there shows that there has been but an increase of three jobs for Bermudians year over year and the 2006 figure is still well below the 27,952 jobs which were held by Bermudians back in 2001 when only three out of every four jobs were held by Bermudians; and please, Mr. Editor, don't get me started on what the PLP Government has achieved in Education over the last nine years. That will be a day's debate next week (see schedule insert).

Like I said words, Mr. Editor, and plenty of them. I think another standard often applied to governments: Talk by the mile, spend by the millions, and move by the inch. House Rules

WHAT we actually debate - and for how long - gets decided by the Opposition under the current House Rules, Mr. Editor. But we can't do everything and so the schedule (see insert) ends up being selective. We are only given 42 hours, which works out to be seven hours a day over six days, and it's very difficult to get a look in when Ministers read from these prepared, pre-packaged interminable briefs, unless of course we devote considerable time to the Ministry.

By the way, and just as a matter of interest, Mr. Editor, I was recently reminded that it used to be that only 35 hours were allotted to the Debate but that was changed by - guess who? - the United Bermuda Party when it was in power at the request of the then Opposition PLP.

See the Rules can be changed, Mr. Editor. All it requires is a Government committed to reform.