OPPOSITION Senator Damion Crawford on Friday ripped into Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness’s budget presentation, declaring it filled with lies, fake news, and an attempt at gas lighting.

Crawford made the charge as the Senate debated and passed the Appropriation Bill, 2025, which outlines how the Government plans to spend the $1.26 trillion allocated in the 2025/26 Estimates of Expenditure.

Crawford, who titled his nearly one hour and 45 minutes presentation ‘Truth and Democracy’, said he chose the topic “because the Government’s debate has been shrouded in lies and fake news”. He accused the Government of lying about inflation, poverty, crime and Finsac, among other matters.

According to Crawford, the prime minister’s use of a graph in his budget presentation in the House of Representatives on March 20, which showed the People’s National Party (PNP) running up inflation to 2,249 per cent between 1989 and 2007 when it formed the Government, did not tell the full story.

He argued that Holness failed to acknowledge that no prior Administration had been in office for such a long period. He also said that to compare Jamaica with the United States — which averaged an inflation rate of 2.9 per cent during the same period when Jamaica averaged 18.5 per cent or 6.3 times higher than the United States — was disingenuous.

“He failed to have done sufficient analysis to recognise that in September 2007 to December 2011, which was the JLP [Jamaica Labour Party in Government], they averaged 12.3 per cent [inflation] relative to the United States’ 1.5 per cent. That’s 8.2 times what was in the United States,” said Crawford.

On the matter of crime, Crawford told the Upper House that the JLP administrations of Holness and Bruce Golding have presided over the highest murder rates in the country’s history.

He provided statistics which showed that the Sir Alexander Bustamante Administration of the 1960s averaged 92.4 murders per year; the Michael Manley Government averaged 362.78 murders between 1972 and 1980; the Edward Seaga-led Administration averaged 446 between 1981 and 1988; and Manley and PJ Patterson averaged 932 between 1989 and 2007.

“Under Bruce Golding and Andrew Holness the murder rate was 1,458 per year, the worst-performing group as it relates to murders in this country,” Crawford declared.

He said that during the Portia Simpson Miller Administration of 2012-2016, when Senator Peter Bunting was minister of national security, the murder rate averaged 1,127.

“Under this Government, this Administration, Andrew Holness only, murder is 1,390 per year — the second-highest — and he wants to disguise that by saying we had a good month, or a good day, or a good quarter,” Crawford claimed.

He said Golding presided over the highest murder rate between 2007 and 2011, followed by Holness.

With the Government constantly touting double-digit declines in murders last year, which has continued into 2025, Crawford questioned, “If you increase it and decrease it, how you must get praise when you don’t reach where it was when you got it?”

The Opposition senator also addressed the issue of the financial sector meltdown of the mid-1990s which saw the collapse of many businesses and the increase in the national debt stock by over 40 per cent. The Financial Sector Adjustment Company (Finsac) was created to manage the crisis.

Crawford pushed back at the argument presented by Holness that it was a homegrown, domestic crisis wholly caused by the PNP. He pointed to data compiled by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which, he said, showed that more than 130 countries experienced banking sector distress between 1980 and 2002.

“Was PJ Patterson the prime minister of 130 countries? Was Omar Davies the finance minister of 130 countries?” he asked rhetorically. He charged that the argument offered by the JLP that bad government policies caused the collapse of the local financial sector did not take into account the crises in over 40 developing and transitioning economies, many of which required bailouts and where asset management companies, such as Finsac, were formed and IMF programmes implemented.

Regarding poverty, Crawford sought to debunk a claim by Holness that under his Administration there was a “steady and measurable decline in poverty apart from a temporary spike in 2020 caused by the pandemic”.

Using the same graph that Holness used in his budget presentation, Crawford pointed out that “in 2016 [when the JLP returned to office] poverty was 11.6 per cent and now it is 12.1 per cent. It has increased, yet we have a prime minister that says this graph that shows an increase in [poverty during] his Administration clearly shows that under his Administration there is a steady and measurable decline”.