How much confidence do you have in our new government?

| 13/06/2017 | 24 Comments

Cayman News Service(CNS): Following a weekend of horse trading after the 24 May General Elections, Alden McLaughlin was able to form a government and retain his position as premier. However, in order to accomplish this, he had to form alliances with both McKeeva Bush’s Cayman Democratic Party and three Independents: Tara Rivers (a strong ally throughout the previous administration), Dwayne Seymour (a former UDP member) and rookie MLA Austin Harris.

Rivers and Seymour have both been given Cabinet positions (see ‘John-John’ to get seat at Cabinet table), while Harris is now a ministry councillor (see Capt Eugene to work on environment).

This is not the strong majority that McLaughlin was hoping for. In many ways, his position is similar to British Prime Minister Theresa May’s in that because the government is dependent on a coalition, the ruling party does not have the last say on policy decisions and give-and-take will be inevitable to hold the alliance together.

A coalition government can also create a measure of uncertainty as to whether it will last or fall apart if they cannot work together.

See the results of the survey here

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Category: Opinion Poll, Politics

Comments (24)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Anonymous says:

    Tara’s xenophobic pension plan for expats will destroy this country’s economy. Who will rent all these potentially empty apartments? How will the business especially restaurants and supermarkets manage with 3000+ less customers who will be leaving with millions of dollars in pension before year end. Omg wake up.

    1
    5
  2. Anonymous says:

    For better and for worst they are a perfect representation of the Caymanian People!

    4
    19
  3. Anonymous says:

    They are the best out of the lot to run the country. Would have liked to see Wayne and Marco be reelected they did so well for the country. I can’t imagine the Shadow Government running this country would be a complete disaster.

    14
    12
  4. Anonymous says:

    Can they please make an immediate and meaningful effort to remove the rot from the Customs Dept., the Police Dept., the Immigration Dept, the Fire Dept. and the DVDL.This is by no means all the rot, just what has been in the news very recently.

    23
    1
  5. Anonymous says:

    All politicians are egocentric, narcissistic, greedy people, that absolutely do not care about you.

    If they would, there would be little crime and unemployment and there would be affordable healthcare.

    I know of people in need for an MRI/x-ray, but the 196 minimum package does not cover that.
    Thank you Gilbert and Anthony.
    People that can only afford this minimum insurance coverage will loose their job, and end up I don’t know where . . .

    22
    3
  6. Liverpool says:

    We will see how long it last then makes a decision.

    10
  7. Anonymous says:

    Can Tara be as appalling this time as she was last time?

    18
    13
    • Anonymous says:

      Did any of the prior Education/Labour ministers do any better? Will Julianna do better with Education portfolio?

      13
      1
      • Anonymous says:

        Royston knew how to listen to the team around him Unlike Tara who knew nothing about education and was arrogant enou to think her advisers were worthless.

        12
        5
      • Anonymous says:

        I am looking forward to the new science curriculum, with the moon being 2,000 years old and people and animals all appearing by magic.

        5
        1
      • Anonymous says:

        Such high standards…

        3
        1
    • Anonymous says:

      I believe Tara should be given education again so that she can implement what she started. Wayne Panton should be brought on board as a councillor in her Ministry to handle Financial Services.I am sure that he can be appointed according to Section 54.6 of the Constitution.

      4
      2
  8. Anonymous says:

    There’s driftwood and then there’s dead wood.

    26
    2
  9. Anonymous says:

    Confidence! How would you feel if your employer hired you with full medical coverage and then decided to make you contribute to it.? No.
    I wait to see if politicians and all the other freebies are also going to have to pay!

    14
    2
  10. Anonymous says:

    Based on who was elected and the scenarios that played out, this is the best outcome. I am prepared to support the government in its endeavors as long as it is good for the country and there is benefits for ALL of our people, not just a select few!

    44
    3
  11. Anonymous says:

    The “weighted averages” in your results make no sense. Further explanation is in order.

    CNS: Good point. I’ve added an explanation under the link to the results. Does it make sense now? In any case, the results include the actual values and precentages.

    • Anonymous says:

      Sorry to pick on you, but putting the weighted averages graph on a scale of zero to ten still makes no sense, nor, frankly, does assigning 3 2 and 1 as the values. 10, 5, and 0 would work better, or a scale of 1 to 3. And btw the averages are not weighted, they are just plain old averages. This is all probably a symptom of too much exposure to Cayman government math.

      CNS: I don’t feel picked on 🙂 Survey Monkey doesn’t seem to allow me to change the graph scale, so I changed the values to 10, 5 and 0, which I admit works better. Thanks for the suggestion. SM calls them weighted averages. What they mean is how much weight/importance you (the person who creates the survey) give to the answer. Giving ‘Yes’ the highest and ‘No’ the lowest and ‘Undecided’ in between seemed to make sense to me.

      3
      1
    • Anonymous says:

      I see CNS fixed one scale so it wasn’t out of 1 through 3 yet the scale shows 1 through 10. But they haven’t fixed it for the councillors. It’s very deceiving.

      CNS: Calm down for heaven’s sake and stop looking for something to gripe about. I changed it on the ministers’ question first to see what it looked like. It worked better so I also changed the counsellors’ question also. You just clicked on the results sometime in the two minutes in between those two things. Jeesh!

  12. Jasmine says:

    This is a good group of ministers wish them all the best.

    23
    13
  13. Anonymous says:

    This is a great selection of ministers chosen to represent the people of the Cayman Islands, wish we could have added Marco and Wayne.

    45
    16
  14. Anonymous says:

    While I’d like to keep open minded about those elected, it is very difficult to imagine how these dictated roles will play out.
    Time is still young but I am still apprehensive. I hope that, with differences and egos aside, those elected can work for the altruistic good of the people, Caymanian, status holders, visitors alike.

    20
    6
  15. Anonymous says:

    A really weak cabinet with unqualified and untrustworthy persons given their track records in jumbled ministries is a recipe for disaster. Would you hire any of them to run your business?

    18
    35
    • Anonymous says:

      idk, CIDB isn’t giving out any small business loans to start-ups.

      11
      1
    • Anonymous says:

      Some of them may be weak but persons such as Roy McTaggart have had top level private sector experience in an audit firm and Moses Kirkconnell and Joey Hew both have had many years in managing their own privately owned businesses.

      51
      5

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.