In­creas­ing oil pro­duc­tion in Trinidad can­not be done on short-term drilling con­tracts. T&T needs three rigs drilling on land and two off the west coast drilling on a con­tin­u­ous ba­sis to move our oil pro­duc­tion back up to 100,000 BOPD.

SPT needs to be low­ered in or­der to en­cour­age Her­itage, and oth­er oil com­pa­nies to drill more to in­crease pro­duc­tion.

There are no plans for drilling on the West Coast next year and from Oc­to­ber drilling on the East Coast will be re­duced...

Com­pa­nies need to be en­cour­aged to drill ex­plo­ration wells to find deep­er re­serves and al­low­ing the full cap­i­tal cost of these wells to be writ­ten off against SPT.

Cli­co ex­pec­ta­tions—what is go­ing on? We need to know.

In­dis­ci­pline in schools as gangs take over chil­dren.

Be­cause of the down­size in the econ­o­my, com­pa­nies’ have laid off staff and the Gov­ern­ment should say what they are do­ing to give em­ploy­ment to the thou­sands of school leavers’ an­nu­al­ly and the busi­ness sec­tor needs the VAT re­funds to en­able some of them to kick start the con­struc­tion sec­tor.

Pen­sion­ers’ should not still be pay­ing In­come Tax on their pen­sions’ af­ter hav­ing worked all their life pay­ing In­come Tax and now re­tired, their pen­sions’ are still hav­ing In­come Tax de­duct­ed.

In this bud­get, he needs to bring back 2.5 per cent tar­iff on cap­i­tal goods or some of the items as he did with VAT.

The min­is­ter has to look at his al­lo­ca­tions to the min­istries that are not pro­duc­ing.

Bud­get 2019 will as al­ways con­tain a lot of pro­pos­als but lit­tle re­sults.

First­ly do a re­view and re­port to cit­i­zens on the last bud­get min­istry by min­istry.

No se­ri­ous at­ten­tion is be­ing giv­en to the en­vi­ron­ment waste man­age­ment, dis­pos­al and re­cy­cling of garbage.

France just banned plas­tic cups. What are we do­ing? Re­solve the de­plorable sit­u­a­tion of hu­mans, clas­si­fied va­grants, vis­i­ble on our city streets. Fix the at­ti­tude of civ­il ser­vants in de­liv­ery of ser­vice.

No au­dit­ed fi­nan­cials from To­ba­go for the bil­lions al­lo­cat­ed over the past years. I ex­pect the cus­tom­ary more talk and less achieve­ment!

Gor­don Laugh­lin

West­moor­ings