remember the international respect we command because of our economy. Bermuda has just borrowed huge sums of money to cover the Tynes Bay incinerator and the schools restructuring programme and attracted numerous foreign banks eager to do business with Bermuda. There are very few countries in that happy position.

Basically we are borrowing for two huge capital projects, both of which were thought vital to Bermuda. Not all of this is for new loans. Some is new money for the schools but some is to repay an old loan and some of the $75 million includes a loan already held by Rothschild's. The truth is that without a good credit rating, we would have difficulty borrowing and might well have to go without the schools programme.

According to Finance Minister the Hon. David Saul, the loan was put out for bid and attracted numerous foreign banks eager to do business with Bermuda, which was assigned a high AA1 rating by Moody's Investors Service, an international rating agency. This very high rating comes about because of Bermuda's high per capita income, prudent financial policies, low debt ratios and stable democratic nature.

We think that in many ways international recognition is the thanks Bermuda gets for its good management of the economy in the years since the Second World War and for the careful way successive Finance Ministers have behaved in more recent years. Bermuda's good economy is, in fact, just like money in the bank.

Bermudians often seem to take the sound economy on which our lavish lifestyle is based for granted. We assume that we should live the way we do without recognising that our standard of living is an achievement and not a right. It would have been very easy in the years after the Second World War, when Bermuda was rebuilding tourism, to create a temporary boom economy. That boom would now be long over and Bermuda would be left with the remnants.

Instead Bermuda built a careful economy and a well planned Country which has provided us with a standard of living second to none.

It is true that in recent years tourism has had problems, probably because of its maturity. Bermuda was in the tourism business very early and, as a result, it suffers from a more mature approach and plant, a potential visitor reaction of "been there, done that'' and a Bermudian public which takes tourism for granted and too often looks on its income as an inconvenience.

But we no longer have a one-legged economy and despite a recession we do well.

Because of that, we are able to embark on the vast expense of the incinerator and the schools programme. These projects would be unthinkable in other countries much larger than Bermuda. They would also be unthinkable in Bermuda without its economic success.