Dear Sir,

When it comes to political opinions, I accept whatever comes my way so I can learn a lesson or be encouraged, always with an ear to doing better.

But Keith Godfrey’s letter to you on March 21 is one of those moments when I have got to stop and say, “Hold on, Sir!”

You can call the One Bermuda Alliance a lot of things, I suppose, but “asleep at the wheel” is not one of them.

We were elected in late 2012 when the island was in the midst of an economic collapse: continuing job losses, business departures, huge annual deficits growing our debt ... The momentum behind these and other negative forces was immense and our job became like turning around a supertanker in full throttle.

We have stabilised the overall situation and have things going in the right direction — GDP has been growing across two years, we are on track to eliminate the deficit in 2018-19 and we have brought tourism back from long decline.

These are big accomplishments that were built on a lot of positive developments made possible by the Government.

But not everything has come in as we hoped. Job creation has been slow, but we have been working overtime to make it happen, and it has been building through hotel developments, the airport redevelopment, the America’s Cup and growing tourist numbers.

We have always conducted our work with a sense of urgency because we know our election owed much to people who had lost ground under the former government. Their struggles did not automatically come to an end with the December 2012 election.

We have been criticised for being about business before people, but our primary focus had to be the economy because of its potential to help more people, more quickly than anything else.

We have also made progress on a lot of other issues that matter to people: increased pensions, access to medical marijuana, more affordable drugs for seniors, family mediation reforms to protect children, the anti-gang Great programme in schools, ambulance service east and west, and Cashback to Communities, which has distributed more than $600,000 to community-based groups.

We have made Bermuda more transparent and accountable through freedom of information and more inclusive through reform of the Human Rights Act. I am not going to be critical of Mr Godfrey’s letter because I sense his frustration and I am not going to question that. People who express what they are feeling help governments to govern better.

What I will take issue with is Mr Godfrey’s statement that the OBA has been “asleep at the wheel”. That is just not the case. We have had all hands on deck and managed to turn the wheel to get that supertanker moving in the right direction.

We have not made port yet, but we will.

MICHAEL H. DUNKLEY

Premier of Bermuda

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