of Education. This concern was compounded over the weekend by indications that the Ministry plans to hire five people to help implement its major education reforms. This will cost $350,000 a year and takes place at a time when Government supposedly has a moratorium on new hiring. Ministers constantly excuse inaction by citing budget constraints as delaying all sorts of things, including repairs to our roads which are now in a disgraceful state.

One of the new jobs advertised is for a "communications officer'' at an extraordinarily hefty $51,000 a year.

The Opposition Progressive Labour Party is quite right in criticising the job as a duplication of Government's existing Department of Information Services and the overall hiring as a cost splurge in a time requiring restraint.

This newspaper finds the hiring of a communications officer to be totally ludicrous. The job can be done perfectly well by Information Services, which is already extravagantly staffed, without additional staffing at the Ministry.

As we see it, if Government really feels that Education Minister the Hon.

Gerald Simons needs this post added to his Ministry, then Government owes the public an explanation of what is wrong at Information Services that it cannot do its own job. If every ministry is to have a "communications officer'' then we do not need Information Services. If Government really believes the job has to be done at the Ministry of Education, as the Minister of Education suggested to the House of Assembly, then Government has to explain to the public why the job cannot be done by the present ministry staff.

The Ministry has very extensive staffing. We do not think this "communications'' job is very difficult. Professional eyes have estimated that, as advertised, it is about one or two days of work per week. The same eyes also estimate that Government is offering some $15,000 a year more than the job is worth in Bermuda.

We think we know what really happened. The Ministry of Education, encouraged by the Education Planning Team, decided on major education reforms which, generally, made the public very unhappy. The Ministry then tricked itself by thinking that its reforms were all right and only needed proper presentation to the public to be acceptable. The Ministry is still determined to have its way and thinks it can make the public swallow what the public does not want.

It is now going to charge the public to coat the bitter pill.

Government gave the public a little rest from talk about its education plans, presumably hoping that the public would not return to the fray. In the meantime, the Ministry's thinking has not improved. If the public thinks the Ministry has softened, it has not. It has simply regrouped and decided to charge the public $350,000 per year in defiance of the public will. It refuses to accept it might have adopted a highly questionable Canadian programme which could be wrong for Bermuda, that there might well be severe social problems caused by the proposed mega-school at Prospect, that three high schools might be better in Bermuda, that there are doubts about the effectiveness of middled schools, that any number of people only want the present system improved or that its plan might lead to a huge flight of students to private schools here and abroad, entirely defeating its main purpose.

Now it seems to think that the solution is a little PR. That is nonsense. The public should refuse to pay for such blindness.