Giving a reply to a Budget in which few taxes were increased and there were no spending cuts is not the easiest task in the world. Nonetheless, Shadow Finance Minister and Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons had the job on Friday, and on the whole, he did a good job.

Rightly, he chose to focus more on what was not in the Budget rather than what was, picking up on the deliberate omissions and the areas that Finance Minister Paula Cox skated over in her Budget Statement from a week earlier.

Nor did he miss one of the most interesting semantic points in the Statement; notably the transformation from a ?Budget? to a ?National Budget?; this in spite of the fact that Bermuda is not (yet) a nation and will not decide on nationhood for at least a few months.

He also picked up on the point that Ms Cox did not say how much money would be spent on the Bermuda Independence Commission?s work. This funding is hidden somewhere in the Cabinet Office?s budget and it will be interesting to see if Ms Cox or Premier Alex Scott will actually tell the public how much will be spent.

Indeed, this Budget is notable for accounting stunts that would do Enron?s accounting department credit. Ms Cox spent time in the Budget Statement emphasising how little debt the Progressive Labour Party Government had incurred. It was for Dr. Gibbons to point out that this is largely because the Finance Ministry has consistently underestimated tax revenues and because the Government has failed time and time again to spend the money allocated for capital projects in the year for which it was allocated.

That makes tracking spending on capital projects almost impossible. Is there anyone, Mr. Scott and Ms Cox included, who can honestly say how much the Berkeley project will end up costing? Dr. Gibbons also spent a good deal of time in the statement on the subject of private-public financing of public projects, which Government seems to be embracing.

One might think that Dr. Gibbons, as the leader of a conservative party, would embrace the idea. Not so, and for good reason. The history of private financing of public works is not pretty.

It does not necessarily deliver value for money and it may not deliver the projects on time and on budget. But, with any number of capital projects looming on the horizon, they may keep Government spending off the books, and will thus prevent Bermuda taking on record amounts of public debt at the same time that interest rates are starting to rise again.

Dr. Gibbons also raises the question ? in carefully couched terms ? of just what the Bank of Bermuda and its parent, HSBC, hopes to get for its very generous $1 million gift (first revealed in the Budget) to the Housing Corporation. The United Bermuda Party is right to ask the question.

Dr. Gibbons raised a wide number of other issues in his speech, from corruption to housing to pensions to health care and makes a number of criticisms on each. Government either has not dealt with the problem adequately (housing and pensions) has sloughed the problem off to someone else (health) or has ignored it completely (corruption).

These are, undeniably, good times for the Bermuda economy, Dr. Gibbons said. But little or nothing is being done to prepare the Island for bad times. What happens if international companies? growth slows? What happens if the construction boom turns to bust? What happens if Tourism Minister Ewart Brown?s ?pop and sizzle? fails to turn tourism around?

Dr. Gibbons is right to raise the questions. It is easier in good times to make hard decisions about controlling public spending and solving some of the chronic social problems the Island faces. But most have been put off for a rainy day.