Despite recent efforts to unseat him from the Public Accounts Committee, and in the midst of his corruption trial, Opposition Leader McKeeva Bush attended the first hour of the committee’s meeting on Tuesday.
The meeting, held to review a series of reports issued by the auditor general’s office on governance, was carried over from earlier in the month. During proceedings, Mr. Bush asked Deputy Governor Franz Manderson to clarify certain “good governance” policies established in the past decade.
Previous policies
“What we now call good governance were some of [the policies] we took for granted that you could do,” Mr. Bush said.
“For instance … when I got elected in 1984 and before, ministers were able to chair various authorities … that was an accepted practice and I think every minister did,” he said.
Mr. Bush said the previous practice, changed by the former People’s Progressive Movement government during its 2005-2009 term, led to more accountability in some cases because the minister, as board chairman, “couldn’t say he didn’t know.”
“[Now] you don’t attend the meetings, you don’t chair it, things go on and sometimes you don’t know … and then [the] audit report comes out and paints you very black.”
Conflicts of interest
Mr. Manderson said the appointed board is required to carry out the policies of the government of the day. However, issues surrounding certain board members’ conflicts of interest haven’t gone away since the removal from the ministers.
“The test of bias is not whether there is bias, but whether there is the appearance of bias,” Mr. Manderson said. “That has been a challenge for all of us to hammer into civil servants and board members, that the best thing to do [when there’s a conflict] is get up and leave … don’t be involved in the decision at all.”
Second-guessing
Mr. Manderson acknowledged this had led to some second-guessing among public officials concerning their decisions while serving on appointed boards, and it can affect the timeliness of some decision-making.
“That is the price you pay for good governance and I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Committee Chairman Roy McTaggart said earlier this month that he had written to Mr. Bush, his deputy on the committee, asking him to resign because of “conflicts of interest,” following the opposition leader’s public criticism of the auditor general.
Mr. McTaggart said he felt Mr. Bush had taken some of the recent audit reports personally and would find it difficult to examine them objectively.
Mr. Bush has dismissed the criticism as “political trickery” and said he had every right to criticize public officials.
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