Young: Govt running distraction campaign from job losses

For­mer prime min­is­ter Stu­art Young has ac­cused the gov­ern­ment of us­ing dis­trac­tions to di­vert at­ten­tion from wors­en­ing eco­nom­ic con­di­tions, af­ter fig­ures from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) showed rough­ly 6,000 jobs were lost in the first quar­ter of 2026.

In a state­ment on Tues­day, Young said while Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar was lead­ing what he de­scribed as a "dis­trac­tion cam­paign", thou­sands of cit­i­zens, in­clud­ing some of the coun­try's most vul­ner­a­ble, were un­em­ployed and strug­gling to sup­port their fam­i­lies.

"Whilst Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar is lead­ing a dis­trac­tion cam­paign there are tens of thou­sands of cit­i­zens in­clud­ing some of our most vul­ner­a­ble who are un­em­ployed. They and their fam­i­lies are hurt­ing, wor­ried about where the next meal will come from and how chil­dren will re­turn to school," he said.

Young linked the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges to the clo­sure of two ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al petro­chem­i­cal com­pa­nies at Point Lisas, Nu­trien and Methanex, say­ing the shut­downs had re­sult­ed in job loss­es, re­duced for­eign ex­change earn­ings and low­er gov­ern­ment rev­enue.

He al­so ques­tioned why the Min­istry of En­er­gy had not pub­lished month­ly oil and gas pro­duc­tion da­ta since No­vem­ber 2025.

"What is be­ing hid­den?" he asked.

The for­mer prime min­is­ter said hun­dreds of small and medi­um-sized busi­ness­es had al­so closed as eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty slowed. He crit­i­cised in­creas­es in tax­es, elec­tric­i­ty and LPG prices, as well as the in­tro­duc­tion of a land­lord tax, say­ing they had raised the cost of do­ing busi­ness dur­ing an al­ready dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od.

Young fur­ther ac­cused the gov­ern­ment of in­creas­ing the coun­try's debt by bor­row­ing bil­lions of dol­lars over the past year, in­clud­ing US$1.8 bil­lion, while rev­enue had de­clined. He al­so ques­tioned the with­draw­al of more than US$510 mil­lion from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund, say­ing no ex­pla­na­tion had been pro­vid­ed.

Turn­ing to na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, Young crit­i­cised the con­tin­ued State of Emer­gency, claim­ing there were se­ri­ous con­cerns over the use of Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs).

"We are in a rolling State of Emer­gency where there are se­ri­ous ques­tions to be an­swered as to the abuse of PDOs is­sued by the gov­ern­ment. Our con­sti­tu­tion­al rights are be­ing sus­pend­ed. Voic­es of dis­sent are threat­ened and some even si­lenced by in­car­cer­a­tion us­ing PDOs," he said.

Young al­so ac­cused the gov­ern­ment of un­der­min­ing de­mo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples through a lack of ac­count­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy.

"Democ­ra­cy is un­der un­prece­dent­ed at­tack. The coun­try is be­ing cal­lous­ly gov­erned by tweet and Face­book posts with no ac­count­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy," he said.