P.U.P. will boycott House Meeting
In political news, the House of Representatives meets tomorrow in Belmopan, and while the government will no doubt push through its new tax proposals, the opposition People’s United Party will not be a part of the debate. Instead the P.U.P. will hold a press conference Friday morning in Belize City at which leader Said Musa will announce his party’s position on the bill. Musa told News Five that when the P.U.P. went back to the House on May twenty-second, it was a last attempt to be part of the democratic process in the National Assembly, but those good intentions were all for naught.
Said Musa, Leader, P.U.P.
“There again the Speaker behaved, in our view, quite ridiculously. He went to the extent of historically ordering an elected P.U.P. member of the House to leave the House, when all the member was trying to do was to discuss issues of public concern. He was not allowed to do so. The Deputy Leader of our party, the Honorable John Briceño when he was discussing again on the adjournment the question of the serious crime situation following the May second mass robbery and murder on the Hummingbird Highway, again he was muzzled and not allowed to express his views. So we found that quite frankly the House of Representatives is not a place, under the U.D.P., where the business of the people can be discussed. And tomorrow we feel that we can better spend our time discussing with the Belizean people in a press conference, matters of great concern to them.
We will be stating clearly the party’s position on this new business tax. What has happened is the U.D.P. has been rushing through the House and intent to pass tomorrow this new income tax amendment bill which will in fact bring into effect a business tax on July the first this year. We have serious concerns about this tax. First of all when you look at it, how can a government at the end of its term be imposing a new tax on the Belizean people when they’ve had five years to review the whole tax situation and they’ve spent these five years imposing G.R.T. first, then they removed the G.R.T. and brought in the killa VAT. Now they’re coming back with the G.R.T. and calling it a business tax and they’re doing it to take effect even after their five year political mandate has come to an end. That in itself is quite unjust but they are not paying any attention to the opposition or indeed the business community or indeed to the voices out there. You heard the propaganda, they intend to go through with this bill and no matter what we say they intend to proceed.”
Other issues to be addressed at Friday’s Press Conference at the Radisson are lingering problems with re-registration and the crime situation in the country.
When the media gets done taking aim at Musa tomorrow morning, the P.U.P. leader will head west for the seventh session of the People’s Assembly. Musa will present his party’s policy paper on agriculture and tourism, promoting the two as the major means of helping to put the country’s economy back on track.
Said Musa
“We will set out at the People’s Assembly tomorrow night how we see things in terms of the neglect and abandonment of agriculture. What we propose to do as the next government to transform our agriculture and to make it a really prosperous agriculture for our farmers and for the nation as a whole. And secondly how the measures that we will take to really push tourism forward as perhaps the most important industry into the twenty-first century. And the linkages that can take place within agriculture and tourism in the sense of the agricultural sector can provide more of the food stuffs, more of the produce that goes into the tourist sector and with this kind of synergy, this kind of linkage we see it serving as the number one foreign exchange earner for our country and indeed the boost that we need for our economic development.”
Friday’s People’s Assembly will be held at the Novelo’s Convention Centre in Santa Elena. The meeting starts at seven thirty p.m.
