Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons hit most of the right notes on Friday in his reply to the Throne Speech.

But he got to the heart of the matter when he asked why the Progressive Labour Party was saying it was only now tackling social issues. If that was the case, he asked, what it had been doing for the past six years? "Pretending?"

This is the fatal flaw in the PLP Government's decision to put so much weight on the "Social Agenda", given that it was elected in 1998 precisely because voters felt that the previous United Bermuda Party government had failed to deal with a range of social problems, including equal opportunity and, perhaps most importantly, housing.

Dr. Gibbons noted, rightly, that Premier Alex Scott had explained that the PLP Government had spent the previous six years ensuring the stability of the economy.

Dr, Gibbons, also rightly, said that was the Finance Minister's job. What had the Minister of Health or the Minister of Education been doing during that time?

Indeed, the Government's modus operandi seems to be one of, "well, we have to do this first, and then we will do that", the political equivalent of someone who has trouble walking and talking at the same time.

Good government means being able to tackle more than one task at a time, of setting and juggling priorities, dealing with emergencies as they come along while keeping the Government going in a consistent policy direction.

Admittedly, this is harder than it sounds, but it is what governments are elected to do. Now, to be sure, any Government has challenges it must face. And the PLP did have to demonstrate that it could run the highly successful economy it inherited. Whether the economy is in better shape today than it was in 1998 is a question for another time, but it should not and did not take the PLP six years to show it would not drop the ball.

So Mr. Scott's rationale is fatuous.

So was the other excuse that the PLP rolled out, as it has done ad nauseam since it was elected; that things were in such a mess when it inherited the Government that it is still fixing them.

After six years, this argument has become so thin that it is transparent. It is unfortunate that Housing Minister Ashfield DeVent was one of the PLP MPs to roll it out. Mr. DeVent, who is finally starting to do something about the crisis, must know something about the depth of the crisis in 1998 and, more importantly, his predecessors' failures to get to grips with it. Instead, it was the UBP's fault, apparently for not painting homes regularly enough when it was in power.

Did the UBP do enough about housing in the mid-1990s when the housing shortage began to bite? No, and it paid the price at the polls. But that's no excuse for the PLP inaction and scandals that followed.

Dr. Gibbons claimed the PLP's trumpeting of the Social Agenda is an act of desperation by a Government fighting for survival.

Mr. Scott does deserve credit for at least attempting to focus the Government on the wide range of social problems that desperately need attention. He was not the Premier before and was presumably too busy making a hash of the Berkeley project to advise the Government on its mistakes.

His error is not in putting the Government's attention on social issues, but in his efforts to portray the Social Agenda as a watershed event, when based on the actual policies and programmes that were presented, it is a hodge-podge of little ideas and old plans that have been repackaged, like a bottle of detergent, as "new and improved".

The Social Agenda, like that bottle of "Super-Clean", is neither.