ANYBODY remember the Great Tourism Debate on the Hill? Need refreshing? Let me see if I can help, although truth be told I wasn't there, home in my bed with the flu. I plugged my ears with the broadcast. A different kind of congestion, but a familiar headache.

Where to begin? Well, it was billed as gargantuan -- which it was, if you're measuring hours and minutes. It started just after eleven in the morning and ended around two the following morning which, allowing for the one-and-a-half-hour lunch break, amounted to a total of 13-plus hours. I counted only 12 speakers -- seven Government, five Opposition -- and of those 12, two of them took up over half the time. No prizes for guessing who the two were: Why the two Davids, of course, the Minister and his Shadow.

Say what you like, Mr. Editor, but those two sure can talk and talk they did as they tackled the Goliath we like to call tourism. But slinging words isn't as hard as slinging stones (which may break your bones, with all due deference to the Leadership Forum), but slinging them isn't nearly as important as spinning them to advantage if you're a politician. It's the stock and trade on the Hill.

Mind you, Mr. Editor, length often isn't as crucial as content -- although the reporters from the Royal Gazette might disagree, as they pulled enough from the debate to fill several column inches spread over three editions. But content is also always subject to strategy in politcis. Ah, Mr. Editor, the political strategy of it all. That's worth a closer look. The whole debate came about because the Opposition were not about to have their voices silenced on the state of tourism by Budget time constraints.

We had in the previous two years allocated four and five hours to the Tourism Budget debate and on each occasion the Minister hogged the time by speaking for three and a half and then four a half hours.

It left precious little time for the Shadow to emerge, never mind any other interested MPs. So the Opposition left the Tourism Ministry out of the Budget debate entirely and instead Shadow David Dodwell put down a take-note motion on tourism. A take-note motion, incidentally Mr. Editor, doesn't call for a vote, only a debate -- a debate without restriction on the number of speakers, or on the length of time each MP speaks. It also meant that Mr. Dodwell would lead off the debate and the Minister would follow.

I don't think Mr. Allen and the Government were amused -- at first. But in the parliamentary game of politics you soon learn to give as good as you get; yes, a kind of different take on the Golden Rule, Mr. Editor, and not one that you learn at Sunday School. (As Dame Lois has pointed out, the House ain't no Sunday school, but it's no picnic up there either.) Stymied, initially, a creative and inventive Mr. Allen decided to get back at us by turning into Ministerial statements parts of his Tourism brief -- those many pages put together by his swivel servants which he would have read to us for three or four or five hours, if he had been given the chance. The statements were read at the start of each day's sitting of the House during the Budget debate, or at least on those days the Minister was here in the island. I think he did it three or four times.

But the Opposition debate remained afoot. It was only a question of when it would occur. Government had asked that we delay the motion until the last day of the House when the Minister was expected back (from another trip abroad), and we obliged, civil people that we are (Forum members, please take note), asking in return that the motion be the main item on the order paper for the day. And so the great debate was fixed for March 23, shortly after eleven in the morning.

Mr. Dodwell did well -- even if it took time to lay out the case. Falling numbers, falling beds, falling expenditure (by visitors, not by Government); a two-year free-fall under the PLP MP who promised going into the '98 election a 100-day rescue plan, which then became a 500-day rescue plan, and now make that two-and-a-half years later and still no evidence of any turnaround in sight.

But hold on, folks, the Minister had his own personal rescue plan in motion as Mr. Dodwell spoke, which he chose to reveal (surprise, surprise) on the day of the debate at a press conference over the lunch break: the Bermuda Alliance for Tourism or BAT for short. The Minister was now on the offensive; he did have a plan, now a three-year job, pulling together the private and public sectors to turn around an ailing industry. There they were, all lined up for the news cameras, arm in arm, hotel and retail, union and Government -- in the same church, sandwiched in the same pew (excuse me) and singing from the same book, as the Minister proclaimed. We were apparently spared a selection: Oh Happy Day.

It also looked like good old-fashioned political strategy to bring into the fold former UBP Government Senate Leader and campaign chairman Mike Winfield, also an hotelier, who testified to his surprise at having even been invited to join in: "An extraordinarily bold move to put politics aside,'' he was quoted as having said. You think so? Looked to me, that the timing and the staging of the announcement was decidedly political.

Will BAT work? This latest rescue plan in a long line of rescue plans, as your brother editor in your sister paper has so aptly described it. Only time will tell, Mr. Editor, and more time -- up to the year 2003 now -- is what the Tourism Minister Mr. Allen and the Government are looking for.

There was some support, too, from the PLP backbench during the debate -- we heard from Messrs Burgess, Burrows, Perinchief, Hodgson and Robinson, although I'm not so sure the support Arthur gave was the sort of support the Minister was looking for.

The preferred position of the PLP was that advanced by Mr. Robinson who wanted everyone to know that what the Opposition describes as tourism in crisis is, in fact, really just tourism in transition. You know, it's that old saw, once again -- the glass isn't half empty, it's half full. Right. Go tell that to the thirsty man, Mr. Editor, whose interest is more water.

But it was very supportive of Mr. Robinson, Mr. Allen's sidekick in tourism as head of the Tourism Board, to pitch in like that: together they make the new tourism team of BATman and Robinson! But while spin is useful, it's the facts that count. We wait to see whether the new approach brings more jobs, more visitors, more money in pockets, more fares for cabs ... and the list, like the debate, goes on.

Speaking of goings on, Mr. Editor, my absence on the final Friday also meant I was not able to take up my paper on changes to the House rules which includes looking at limits on speeches and finishing at more reasonable hours. So sorry again to disappoint, but thankfully my colleagues who were there at two in the morning renewed the motion so I can take up on our return from the Easter recess.

When's that, you ask? Why May the 18th. Yup, an eight-week break. Yippee? I don't think so. The way it looks now, we may be in for another long summer in the House on the Hill.