Eight first-time Members of Parliament - four doctors, an engineer, two lawyers and a businessman - attended an Editor's Forum last Tuesday at The Gleaner's North Street offices, Central Kingston. Below we present excerpts of the forum:
ON CREATING CHANGE
James Robertson
I BELIEVE another way you can create a change and set your standards is how you campaign. Campaigning to your victory depending on how you pitch yourself, market, represent and sell yourself is how people are going to treat you after. That is where you begin to shape what you consider your responsibilities and your job description. Promises you cut out, the hands-out you try to stay away from, the cheap shortcuts to a victory if you try and remove those out of your campaign you can begin to set and change the perceptions out there but it is very difficult and it doesn't happen immediately.
Clive Mullings
I think one of the greatest things that has happened in politics is what we would like to call the dulling of the line, the ideological divide. Once you care about the people, they will know if you are genuine or not and once you try to see how you can assist them out of the poverty, then they will respect that. I don't want to sound too idealistic but the fact is, if we have the confidence and as young politicians I see across the party line and in Parliament you can know persons who are trying to get out of the old way of doing things.
SALARIES AND CONSTITUENCY EFFICIENCY
James Robertson
If the Members of Parliament had a true level of governmental support and the country was supporting the work of a Member of Parliament properly, I would agree on the salary issue. But when that support is not there for equipping a proper office you realise that you are using your salary to support those activities. Then you understand why most of us feel that what is coming from the Government is not sufficient at this time. If you look at it as a true salary, then I would agree, but when you have to fund and run an office at the standards that I want to run my office and communicate and be able to put out information, then you will understand that we are totally under-funded.
Victor Cummings
We have our office and I have there a full-time secretary who has to be paid, we have a social worker, we have a community organiser and every Friday I have to find money to pay those people. I am in the office on Thursdays between 9:00 and 12:00 o'clock and between that time I see about 35 to 40 people. A couple months ago, I just kept on writing cheques, assisting here, here, here and when it came time to pay my children's school fees there was no money and you can't tell people that. They wouldn't believe it because everything had been spent out assisting and my family came last.
Dr. St. Aubyn Bartlett
It's a very difficult thing. As a matter of fact it's extremely trying because you must have maybe one or two vehicles if you are going to run an office. There is no support for that kind of thing. That support must come from your own pocket or it must come from the salary that is provided to you as a Member of Parliament. When you talk about the salaries that a Member of Parliament gets, if he takes that salary, the office alone absorbs everything and then you go to the community and every week there is a dead person, they are asking you for assistance to bury that person. When it comes around to school time, every little worker is asking you for some assistance whether it is to buy books, whether it is to buy uniforms, whether it is to pay school fee, the responsibility and what you are expected to do out of what you are provided is just enormous.
Clive Mullings
I am a maverick in this regard. The old notion of the constituency office with a party logo, I don't subscribe to it because you start out by alienating people. I believe in a campaign office and then an office as a Member of Parliament. What I have been doing, I have an office... I am a lawyer so people come in and they tend to believe that they are there for legal business, some are some aren't. Now, the ideal situation is to have a proper Member of Parliament's office, it has to be and so I am personally running a risk when I do it like that. We should not have to go that route, we should have a proper Member of Parliament's office with proper staffing.
ACCESS TO FUNDS
James Robertson
It is very difficult for a Member of Parliament to successfully access the environmental fund that exists, the JSIF fund, all the NGO funding that exists. To support your community development councils you are going to have engineers or seriously skilled individuals willing to give up their time and to help you. Now, I have identified eight such individuals in West St. Thomas, some are PNP, some are JLP, some are no P but they have all agreed to work to develop the constituencies in the parish and we have decided to wait. That is why I was hoping this Local Government election would have come and pass from March because it would have allowed us to get to some real work. It is impossible to campaign and do two three different types of functions at the same time because it is a different machinery, a different mindset and you have to do each of them properly.
ACHIEVEMENTS AT THE CONSTITUENCY LEVEL
Victor Cummings
What I have focused on is organising the constituency. I believe that if I have a properly organised constituency it makes my work easier. We have put in place citizen's associations everywhere and then every other month all the leadership of the citizen's associations meet, we work with the schools. In the respective communities we put in place community councils because there is leadership there you just need to identify them and work with them. As James mentioned the NGOs, they can get access to funds easier than we can, so we work with them, we help them fill out the application, work with them in submitting it and follow up on it and they are getting projects going.
James Robertson
I have gone through and catalogued and identified where the existing projects were, because I am about continuity. What I have done is found the projects, spoken with the existing people regardless of what party or where they stand and we have been able to get these projects fast-tracked and keep them going. I am also including road works we have even been able to work with NWA to get the six, eight projects off the ground started and completed on time before these flood rains. It has been a lot of work, hard work to get it done and spend the time with the government agencies to get them dovetailing in a timely manner that serves the constituency and the people.
SKILLS TRAINING AND ENHANCEMENT
Dr. St. Aubyn Bartlett
As an Opposition Member of Parliament it is not within my capacity to create employment so what I have done is to establish what I am calling a skills bank or a job bank. What we have done is we have designed a form which we have distributed to people within the community. We say to them, fill this form up, give us an idea of what skills you have, what you can do, whether you can be a household helper, whether you can be a gardener, whether you can be a plumber, whatever you can do, fill it up and let us know. When we go to the business community and otherwise, we say give us an idea of some of the skills that you require, people that you may require to do some jobs for you. What we do is to match skills with job requirements. We have got quite a number of people placed in jobs through that process, and we have not spent a penny.
NEW APPROACH TO REPRESENTATION
Dr. Morais Guy
I think with the interaction that I have had with my colleagues on the other side of the House, there is a new approach, a new look to how we view representation, not from a political point of view, but in terms of addressing the needs of the people and I think I can speak freely on our behalf as well as their behalf because we feel we have something, probably I may get into a little hot water when I say that, different to offer from what our predecessors and those older ones in Parliament have to offer.
Dr. Neil McGill
There is a difficulty though I find, when I have my skills bank, my job bank, my unemployment list, what I find is that I have a number of unemployables and as such what I have been doing, I am trying now to have little foci of training and so the major task I have at hand is to create employables because what I inherited, well we all perhaps have done so, is a constituency where persons, they want a job, and nothing nah gwaan but they cannot get a job because they are not qualified, so the major task we have, and I know, in particular have, is in fact to get these persons in a position where they are now employable.
