Community Minister Wayne Scott claimed yesterday he delivered a four-hour statement to Parliament at the request of the Progressive Labour Party, so it wouldn’t have to debate his Ministry’s spending plans.Mr Scott said Shadow Minister Michael Weeks asked him to talk for the entire four hours of a session designed to give the Opposition a chance to scrutinise his Ministry’s $86.4 million budget.But Mr Weeks told The Royal Gazette: “I came prepared to take my 15 minutes in the sun, so to speak.”Mr Scott spoke from a prepared 134-page statement to the House of Assembly on Monday, giving Mr Weeks and other MPs no time to ask questions or comment on the 2013/14 budget for the departments of Youth, Sport and Recreation; Child and Family Services; Community and Cultural Affairs; Financial Assistance; and Human Affairs.With just minutes left of the session, Mr Weeks told the House: “I was expecting to have some time to talk.”Yesterday, he shared 64 pages of notes with this newspaper, which he said he’d planned to refer to if he’d been given time to speak.But new Minister Mr Scott claimed he spoke to Mr Weeks on Friday and his Shadow counterpart asked him to use up the whole four hours, so Opposition MPs couldn’t “make political hay” of the subject matter.“This is something that they, unofficially, that my Shadow, unofficially, was in agreement with,” said the One Bermuda Alliance MP.“We have committed to work together to make sure we don’t play political football with something that’s so critical to Bermuda, which is the social programmes.”Mr Scott, who spoke in the House from 10.15am until 12.30pm and from 2pm until 3.45pm, said he approached Mr Weeks during the lunch break to see if he’d changed his mind and wanted to speak.“I asked again yesterday at lunch time: ‘do you want me to shut it down?’ and I was told to run it out. They [Mr Weeks and Opposition leader Marc Bean] said ‘just run it out because those guys are going to make political hay out of it’. I do understand that the Opposition can’t take this as an official stance.”Mr Scott said the annual Budget debate was the “Opposition’s debate” and the “gentlemanly thing to do is to ask your counterpart: how much time do they require?”.The Minister insisted he’d have given a shorter statement if asked to do so and was not trying to stop debate.Asked if he’d wasted four hours of parliamentary time, he replied: “I wouldn’t say it was wasted time. Could it have been done in less time? Yes.”He said he’d continue to meet with Mr Weeks on a regular basis to “make sure he is fully aware of what’s going on”.But he added: “If you say you are going to do something collaboratively, let’s do it. The whole time of saying one thing and doing something else is a bit old.”Mr Weeks held a press conference yesterday to criticise spending cuts in the Ministry.Afterwards, he told this newspaper: “He [the Minister] said he needs more than four hours because he has a lot of material he wanted the public to get.“So it wasn’t up to me to tell him that he could speak or not, that was his time. He had the mic, he had the four hours, he had the brief, he talks slow.“But he did reach out to me and say it’s always open for me to come and speak with him.”Asked if it could have been a misunderstanding, the PLP MP said: “Yes. Community and Cultural Development is a very important ministry, especially with what we’re going through socially.“If the Minister is saying he’s willing to work with me, what I don’t want to do is throw him under the bus. I could accept it could be a misunderstanding, a miscommunication.“But I was up all weekend. I came prepared to take my 15 minutes in the sun, so to speak.”Former United Bermuda Party leader Kim Swan said Mr Scott’s speech was a “waste of taxpayer money”.He asked: “How could the new Government allow itself to participate in the act of stifling debate — a practice many of them roundly criticised when former Premier Dr Ewart Brown practised the same tactics — by allowing one of their rookie ministers to engage in a political ploy that is anti-democratic?”Mr Swan added: “It was a sad day for the House of Assembly and has left me to ask where were the level-headed experienced persons that know better.”He went on to say that for two parties to agree to stifle debate was an affront to the principles of good governance.“Good governance goes beyond what you think people want to hear or what you don’t want them to hear. Good governance comes when a democracy is healthy and vibrant.”Useful website: www.parliament.bm