The claim that previous governments used to borrow money to pay for operating expenditure is a “lie, mischievous, deceiving and amount to misleading to the public at large,” Opposition Leader Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu said.
He said it was sad and unprofessional for the Minister for Economy to continuously blame previous governments when things didn’t go right. He said this undermined the integrity of previous leaders who were being patriotic and prudent in managing their public finance.
“The FijiFirst Government has been in power for more than 15 years and continue with the blame game like little kids rather than taking responsibility,” he said while responding to the Revised 2021-2022 National Budget.
“Today, just within 15 years, our debt level has ballooned four times to almost $9.6 billion, this is in addition, our contingency liability for the same period which has increased from $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion.
“This means that our national total exposure today is hovering around $11 billion, more than our current level of GDP in real price.
“The claim that the current government only borrow for capital expenditure is an outright lie.
“It is unfortunate that the nation’s status has been downgraded which is quite embarrassing not because of the impact of climate change but because our gross domestic product (GDP) has declined in real terms and which I’ve stated earlier that we are back to the 2014 level.”
