OPPOSITION Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar accused the Government of ignoring the cries of the jobless, the small businessman and the pupil struggling to do schoolwork on a cellphone.
"The Government has declared war on the people," she charged.
She was giving her budget response on Friday from 10 am-12.30 pm in the House of Representatives.
On top of accusing the Government of offering no new measures to help people, Persad-Bissessar said people can expect more pain from rising household bills such as electricity and water.
She said the budget had no new revenue streams nor plans to create jobs. Persad-Bissessar said it was the first budget in 59 years which did not state last year's spending, earnings and deficit.
On her "war" theme, she said the Government passed bad laws to subvert civil rights, so waging war against its own citizens.
"When, at the beginning of a global pandemic, despite the Opposition's pleas and warnings, a Government chooses to ignore the health and safety of its own citizens for the sake of who knows what, and then desperately engages in treacherous, misleading propaganda to fool citizens, such dangerous disinformation is war against the people."
She accused the Government of "war on the citizens" by hiding statistics amid an rise in covid19 cases, while telling people it was safe to go to Tobago for Easter and queue in their thousands for vaccines. Persad-Bissessar saw lockdowns and curfews as war, by causing joblessness, hunger, and economic, health and social destruction.
"When a Government openly promotes discrimination among the population by engaging in hate-mongering and divisiveness between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens, when it robs the nation's children of their right to an education, when it viciously bullies, defames and seeks to destroy every single citizen who dares to speak out against its failure, incompetence and tyranny, that is waging war against your people." She saw the Police Service Commission debacle and the budget as war against the country.
"When that Government shadily takes over $100 million of taxpayers' dollars to pay off its 'well-oiled' friends, but in its shameless, con-job budget, chooses to tell a starving, desperate, pauperised citizenry who are forced to choose between feeding their children or paying rent to 'Let them eat biscuit and pigtail,' that is the worst kind of war against a population."
Persad-Bissessar vowed to fight the Government both inside and outside Parliament, within the law.
She said the Government's safe-zone plan would fail, after starting next Monday at leisure spots such as restaurants, cinemas and casinos, where staff and patrons must be vaccinated.
Calling this "vaccine apartheid," she said the zones were "illogical, poorly conceived, and bound to fail." In a half-vaccinated population, families of unvaccinated young children would avoid them.
"I expect that these chambers and businesses that are currently supporting this safe-zone policy will eventually ask for it to be discontinued."
