Dionne Rose and Edmond Campbell, Parliamentary Reporters
Industry and Commerce Minister Phillip Paulwell last night survived an Opposition bid to have him removed from office.
Government members outnumbered the Opposition 29 to 17.
The censure motion, tabled by Audley Shaw, the Opposition Spokesman on Finance, called for Mr. Paulwell's resignation and blamed him for the cement crisis which developed after Caribbean Cement Company Limited (CCCL) released faulty cement into the market and 30,000 construction workers were laid off from the sector.
In opening the debate, Mr. Shaw used the Commerce Minister's history of "mismanagement" as the building blocks for his case for censure.
"We saw where the country was promised 40,000 jobs in the expenditure of $1 billion from the Information Technology Fund. What came out of that was a literal loss of the $1 billion of the fund," he said, while stressing that the cement crisis was not the first hint of Mr. Paulwell's incompetence.
Mr. Shaw also noted the Goodyear factory, which should have been transformed into an information technology centre but now remains empty after the expenditure of $150 million.
MINISTER WAS RESPONSIBLE
"The minister was responsible to protect you and me, to protect investors, to protect and save our lives, save our investments, save the structural integrity of our buildings," he said.
But Government backbencher K.D. Knight was the first to take the floor in defence of his colleague. He said the censure motion was uncalled for and claimed the Opposition's bid was to achieve political mileage.
Among the other members who contributed to the debate were Government members Dr. Paul Robertson and John Junor and Opposition members Ernie Smith, Clive Mullings, Andrew Gallimore and Dr. Horace Chang.
