When Premier Alex Scott last gave a speech to the Country three months ago, he was criticised in this column and elsewhere, for its "curiously muted" tone.

It lacked a message of hope and optimism that the public needs to hear from its leaders. To be sure, any speech of this kind has to acknowledge the problems a community faces, but it also needs to say that the Government is aware of the problems and it is tackling them.

On Friday night, Mr. Scott delivered another speech, this one timed to coincide with the end of the parliamentary session. He seemed to have heard the earlier criticism.

The speech was entitled "Reasons for Hope" and Mr. Scott was decidedly more optimistic. That's good news because people need to have reasons to be just that.

That's perhaps more true of Bermuda than other countries. There's nothing wrong with being self-critical when it helps to bring problems to the surface. But self-criticism can be self-defeating when it fails to produce solutions and simply causes resignation and demoralisation.

Mr. Scott noted that the fire at Belco earlier this month and the drought could be "blessings in disguise". In the context of sustainable development, there's some truth in this.

That's because both the drought and the fire demonstrated our dependence on these two vital utilities and also raised questions about whether we as a community were growing too fast, to the point where we could no longer sustain ourselves.

The truth, of course, is that Bermuda cannot sustain its population in the event of a natural disaster for very long. We certainly cannot feed ourselves, and we cannot provide or store enough water in the event of a prolonged drought.

So the fire and the drought provided an impetus for the sustainable development project that it was previously lacking and it should make people think more widely and deeply about the subject than they were a couple of months ago.

Mr. Scott also used the speech to call for a greater vigilance in defence of human rights and civil liberties, and in doing so, recognised that the Bermuda community is more diverse and demands more tolerance than ever before.

This is fairly smart politics, because the Progressive Labour Party continues to be labelled as a black party that is primarily interested in promoting issues and causes that "only" concern black people. Whether that's true or not, it does not demonstrate leadership of the whole of Bermuda, which Mr. Scott said he aimed to do when he became Premier.

So it is welcome that he called for acknowledgement not only of the fact that Bermuda suffers from economic inequity along racial lines, but that "honesty demands that we recognise that not all whites find Bermuda a living paradise, and not all blacks find it a living hell".

And he called for Bermudians to stand up for the rights of non-Bermudians, whites to stand up for the rights of blacks and vice versa and for a public discourse that recognises "that injustice to any one of us is a threat to all of us".

These are welcome words which deserve support.

However, they are also only words. One knock against Mr. Scott, made most recently in today's rg magazine by former PLP MP Julian Hall, is that the PLP has been a Government of style over substance.

Mr. Scott needs to show that he can match his words with action in the coming months.