Premier Ewart Brown spoke to a filled meeting room in Hamilton Parish last night about the dangers of entitlement.

It was a theme that touched on many of the topical issues of the day — the closing Government health clinic, education, housing and the Bermuda workforce. One anecdote seemed to especially get the audience’s attention because of both its humour and sad reality.

The Premier said: “Minister Burch told me that while we were in Trinidad I should look for a certain individual — a fellow who was living at Club Med.” The crowd began to laugh and the Premier said: “This is a true story. Minister Burch said, ‘the guy locked his door at Club Med, left a note saying when he would be back and told his mother to look out for his two sons because he was on his way to cricket’.

“That’s a Bermudian squatter?

“When it gets like that, we need to stop and take stock. There’s something wrong with squatting at Club Med and going to cricket. We can not tolerate that.”

The Premier acknowledged that there were people at Club Med who genuinely needed assistance, but said there was also an air of “relative poverty”.

He carried the same message into a conversation about the future of the Bermudian workforce. He reflected on meetings he had over the weekend with students studying overseas. For the most part he said the meetings were energetic and promising, but there was also a sense of entitlement among some of the students.

The Premier said: “We had comments from the students like, ‘I graduate in May, what is the Government going to do to guarantee me a job?’

“I had to stop some of them because I’m not going to just sit there and let it go like that. I said this is a joint venture. You don’t want to become dependent on the Government.”

The Premier said he told the students that the Government would assist them with assurances of equality and opportunity, but the rest was up to them.

Minister Derrick Burgess shared a platform with the Premier last night. He indicated that the National Training Board was ready to take under performing “wall sitters” and transform them into productive citizens. He estimated that if this unproductive pool of talent was mobilised to become skilled in carpentry or massage or beauty care, for example, the country would immediately need 300 fewer expatriate workers.

Sustainable Development Chairman Arthur Hodgson also explained that a better trained workforce, particularly in tourism, was a positive step toward long term sustainability for the country.

In the end, however, most of the conversations boomeranged to entitlement.

The Premier also talked about the soon to close Government Health Clinic.

He said: “We can not tolerate having so called indigent people at the hospital where all financially disadvantaged people are supposed to go. And we try to replace it with a progressive plan to afford better treatment for these people and there’s a protest organised by the Opposition.”

The Opposition denies it organised the protest the Premier referred to.

While discussing the closing clinic last night the Premier mentioned the list of doctors under the new health system for the under privileged had grown to ten. The last reported figure was six.

The Premier told the crowd his change in healthcare strategy was to prevent any national slide toward welfare.

He said: “Ladies and gentlemen that will create something that I saw living for 30 years in the United States — a welfare system that strips people of their own spirit. We must not allow that to happen in Bermuda. You and I must do everything we can to stop that tendency. It is terrible, it is devastating, if we allow it to take hold.”

A question from the 100-plus sized crowd challenged the Premier’s assertion on entitlement. She asked whether the current Government was partly responsible for making people dependent on Government for the way it ran its election campaign in 1998. The Premier responded: “Yes, there are some people in Bermuda who thought we won in ‘98 and that was it — that they no longer had to push, they no longer had to struggle because their Government was in power. And Bermuda is not the only place where that has happened — where people misunderstand the true nature of a political victory. And after the euphoria wears off they find out that there’s work to do — in fact sometimes more work to do after you win than you were doing under the other circumstances.”