OVER the last few days, this newspaper has used what it termed the Incredulity Index to highlight some of the more extreme aspects of government policy making, the £26 car tax in lieu of a proper funding approach to paid parking being merely the latest example.

The index has taken a further battering with the suggestion that increasing fuel duty would be the ‘fairest’ way of raising money to pay for the public transport strategy.

Yet clearly it will not. What members have – conveniently – lost sight of is that the strategy was put together for a specific purpose: reducing congestion in Town by providing the incentive of a better bus service teamed with the disincentive of using a car by having to pay to park it.

To pretend otherwise at this late stage is to try to deceive islanders and further damage public confidence in the States’ ability to act in a coherent manner.

But perhaps the most pressing aspect of this is how Environment came to present such a dog’s breakfast of a States report in the first place. Surely, islanders will believe, the Policy Council exists to weed out such flights of fancy?

A minister present when the report was first considered told this newspaper that Environment minister Peter Sirett was left in no doubt that the proposals were unsatisfactory and failed to achieve what the department had been charged to do.

It was sent back to Environment with a request for a rethink but its members, who are opposed to paid parking, would not give ground.

As Deputy Sirett later reported back to the council, his board was a democracy and its members’ decision stood.

The result? A fundamentally flawed ‘policy’ has to go forward because there is no mechanism for stopping something the majority of the council knows is wrong.

The minister also explained why Environment is so obstinate on the matter – its members fear that proposing paid parking will cost them their seats at the next general election in 2012.

If correct, that represents short-termism of the worst kind and indicates that self – rather than island – interests dictate policy.