The 2007 Budget Debate is over.

It is true that the Senate will spend the next ten days or so going over most of the same ground as the House of Assembly, and it may be that they will unearth new information and debate several major subjects that were not debated in the House.

But the Senate does not have the power to reject the Budget or even to send it back to the House for reconsideration. And if past practice is any guide, much of what is heard in the Senate will be a retread of the House debate.

At any rate, to call this six-week long exercise a debate is a misnomer. There was a time when it was a genuine debate, when Ministers would speak briefly on their portfolios and their revenue and spending plans, their Shadow Ministers would respond and a genuine debate would follow, with backbenchers and other Ministers putting their two cents' worth in.

Many people over the age of 30 will recall then-Finance Minister David Saul's famous "recession" Budget of 1990 when fierce and frank debate occupied the House and the Island for weeks.

Since then, the debate has degenerated into an exercise in brief-reading which provides a fine cure for insomnia but little more.

It is a quaint practice of Parliament that the Government gets to present the Budget, but it is the Opposition decides what will be debated, and at what length.

Clearly, this was aimed at preventing the Government of the day from setting an agenda in which the bad news would be ignored and hours could be spent on the good news.

However, because the Minister responsible is allowed to speak first, the way for the Government of the day to counter this is to filibuster for as long as possible, thus giving the Opposition very little time to provide counter-arguments.

This practice began under the United Bermuda Party, but it has been brought to a perfection under the Progressive Labour Party. For example, this year, the UBP, seeking to attack what it perceives as the Government's Achilles heel, set aside seven hours to debate education.

Education Minister Randy Horton proceeded to take up four-and-a-half hours reading the brief prepared for him by his civil servants in an exercise which did little to illuminate and much to obscure Government's education plans, which are, at any rate, entirely dependent on the HSBC-sponsored education review.

Shadow Minister Neville Darrell responded for an hour, former Minister Terry Lister spoke for around 45 minutes and former Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons spoke for about half an hour to close out the debate.

All in all, this was a far from inspiring use of the time allotted for one of the most critical issues confronting the Island. There is a theory that Mr. Horton spoke for so long was to prevent Government backbencher Renee Webb from speaking after she lacerated Government's education record last year, rather than to block the Opposition.

Either way, the Budget Debate, in which it is theoretically decided how the people's money will be raised and spent, has become a pointless and wasteful exercise. Little real scrutiny is given to revenue and spending plans, there is almost no debate on the direction the Country should be going, and in all, it does a disservice to the Country.