Education Minister Explains Subsidy Funding

Patrick Faber

The campaign season has been relentless with plenty mudslinging and besmirching candidates at every turn.  The People’s United Party has released an ad claiming that government is spending as much as two point four million dollars in tuition for tertiary students, in exchange for votes in favor of the ruling United Party.  The allegation is being made against Minister of Education and Deputy Prime Minister Patrick Faber.  Today, he responded to that assertion.

Patrick Faber, Minister of Education

“Absolutely untrue, and this is to show you the kind of crookedness that the P.U.P. always come up with.  In fact, because we’re closing the end of the financial year, yes we did a budget exercise, an exercise where we combed through the budget to see where monies were not spent within the ministry.  That does not mean, as we were reminded, that within the government’s coffers that those monies are there and so we made an attempt to ask the government to reprogram some of these monies, the Ministry of Finance, for the use of purchasing some very needed vehicles, for covering subsidies, about three hundred dollars worth of subsidies [per students] and to put some of that money into spending on the people, yes, in terms of scholarships and grants and so on.  There’s no crime in that, that is what we do on a daily basis.  The Ministry of Finance said to us that that money is not there.  In fact, so neither the spending on the vehicles or on, they gave us a little to cover the subsidy monies that were lacking and that is it.  So what we do is in the normal course of our work of helping people to pay these bills once they can’t afford them.”