of Tourism.

And he warned that to leave the organisation as it was, near to death, was to court disaster.

Bob Stewart, chief executive officer of Shell Bermuda, made the call during his address to Hamilton Rotarians at their weekly luncheon at Pier Six.

After siting recent air arrival numbers, the decline in hotel occupancy rates and customer complaints regarding value for money, Mr. Stewart concluded that tourism was in "a very bad way''.

"If the DOT (Department of Tourism) was a private organisation some significant changes would have occurred by now,'' he said. "They may not have resolved the situation but action would have been taken and the organisation and people in it would have been shaken up.'' Although he conceded that the department enjoyed success in the 60's and 70's, Mr. Stewart said things started going wrong in the 1980's.

And he said a number of factors were to blame for the change including, bureaucratic complexity, resistance to change and general indifference to the customer.

"The bureaucratic culture was able to strangle any desire to keep up with the times,'' Mr. Stewart added.

Despite the department's efforts to combat tourism's decline he maintained that "the acid test is success and if your are not successful in the business world you are a failure no matter how hard working, dedicated and innovative you are.'' He said the civil service was concerned with perceptions, making politicians look good, not making hard decisions and pleasing the customer.

"The civil service is established not for the purpose of initiating innovative policies but to concern itself with process, procedure, precedent and public response to government policies,'' Mr. Stewart said. "It is concerned with perceptions and making politicians look good, not making hard decisions whose eventual success is not immediately apparent.

"It is concerned with building consensus and relationships not with action, pleasing the customer and getting value for money.'' And he claimed that management in the civil service did not have the powers it needed to be effective since they could not transfer or promote productive staff or dismiss ineffective employees.

Civil servants are handled by the Public Service Commission or by trade unions.

"The sad fact is that Bermuda tourism is organised along the exactly same lines as it was 15 years ago ...,'' Mr. Stewart said. "In marketing a product like tourism, which has to be constantly revitalised, security of tenure for the person in charge is the kiss of death for the product.

"The conclusion must surely be to privatise its (tourism') operations as was recommended by the Commission on Competitiveness three years ago,'' Mr.

Stewart advised.

Privatise tourism, education "The head of a privatised DOT would then have to prove he can do the job.'' Privatisation is the sale of government owned or operated business or organisations to the public.

Mr. Stewart also advocated the privatisation of the Education Department.

Accusing the Education Department of being "indifferent to the wishes of their customers'' or parents, he said: "Teachers and administrators in the Department of Education are paid irrespective of what the customer thinks, whether a good job or a bad job is done and no one is fired, no salaries are reduced and life goes on very much as before.

"Except that children do not receive the education to which they are entitled in this modern age. And some administrators at the Department of Education send their own children to private school, recognising that many public schools are not up to scratch.'' Mr. Stewart, who was on the Education Planning Team which called for an array of changes to the school system, noted that the department needed to ask itself three uncomfortable questions: Whether they were really providing my customers with what the customers wanted? Why does the present system prevent children from learning the three Rs? and Why do education officials resist excellence and accountability? "If the Department of Education was in private business and gave away its product free and 34 percent of parents said they didn't want the free product and would prefer to pay for a higher quality product provided they were able to choose the school their child attended, the department would probably go into liquidation,'' he added.

Mr. Stewart suggested that Government should implement an educational voucher system, similar to what was used in the US.

"One of the most innovative ways of ending public monopoly and establishing a privatisation scheme is that of making education more responsive to the wishes of parents,'' he said.

"In many countries there is provision for educational vouchers to parents which allows them to determine how and where their children will be educated.

"It is a relatively simple although revolutionary principle which allows the market place to enter the closed world of education.

"For example, in Ohio the legislative in 1996 funded a programme to allow 2,000 poor children to attend private schools. Six thousand applied illustrating that many poor parents want their children to escape the clutches of badly-performing public schools.'' TOURISM TOU