EDITORIAL - With E-Day declared, advice to the parties

Now that Prime Minister Andrew Holness has named the date for the general election, there, inevitably, will be added intensity to the campaigning by the political parties.

This, we hope, will not result in a diminution but, rather, a lifting of the quality of debate between electoral contenders, Mr Holness' Jamaica Labour Party and Portia Simpson Miller's People's National Party.

The test of this will be the clarity with which they lay before voters the fundamental issues that confront Jamaica. So far, neither party has done particularly well at this, although we are encouraged by Mr Holness' willingness to tell supporters it can't be business as usual. There, however, needs to be more.

This kind of campaign demands an environment conducive to serious ideas and thoughtful debate, which the violence that used to shroud Jamaican elections often precluded.

Decrease in violence

Happily, violence and intimidation as tools of political persuasion, though still existent, have substantially diminished in Jamaican politics. Indeed, we are grateful that in this campaign, such action has, up to now, been sparse, and its consequences relatively mild.

For this we congratulate the party leaders. We, however, urge them to continue to enforce discipline in their organisations and warn that they will be held accountable for any egregious behaviour that their own actions, or the actions of their subordinates, might encourage.

In the meantime, until the vote on December 29, it is the big issues that must be placed squarely on the agenda, seriously covered in the manifestos and addressed from the platforms on the hustings.

The most immediate and critical of these issues is Jamaica's debt, which is the foundation of the crisis in our economy, retarding its prospects for recovery and growth and the creation of jobs.

As we have noted often in these columns, at the end of August Jamaica's debt, excluding many off-book transactions, stood at $1.6 trillion, or, officially, around 130 per cent of the value of all goods and services produced in the economy. If everything is taken into the account, the debt is perhaps closer to 140 per cent of gross domestic product.

Jamaica's debt ratio, assuming the higher end of the scale, is around 10 percentage points better than Greece's, but 20 percentage points worse than Italy's, two countries where governments collapsed after they were shunned by lenders, and new administrations were forced to impose painful reforms.

Painful medicine

Jamaica is hardly at a better place. In the previous fiscal year, after servicing debt out of money it received in taxes and grants, our Government had only enough left over to cover a third of the wages of salaries of its employees. It had to borrow to meet its other obligations. A similar situation continues in the current fiscal year.

Fixing will be painful. The public sector must be reformed. Some jobs will be lost. The pensionable age will have to rise and government employees will have to contribute to their pension schemes. The tax system will also have to be reformed to bring those who have, in the past, put little or nothing into the net.

None of us will like the medicine, but it makes little sense to offer sugar-based snake oil as a substitute. The parties should present the unvarnished truth.