JUST one comment from St Peter Port North’s Martin Storey neatly summed up the cultural shift the States of Guernsey has to make to adjust to today’s new economic realities.

If implementing a domestic abuse strategy was such a priority, he wondered, how come none of the five sponsoring departments was prepared to cut existing budgets by just £60,000 to fund it?

As a former director of corporate planning and group treasury for a FTSE 100 company, he is well placed to point out to fellow deputies that if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it.

Yet there is little collective sign that the States as a whole has got that message.

What Deputy Storey’s comment highlighted is the still widespread belief that new services can be introduced without regard to the cost because the unspoken understanding is that the taxpayer will simply have to dig deeper.

His remark also brought into focus the silo mentality of States departments that has been so criticised by the Wales Audit Office and Tribal Consulting: others have to make savings because what we do cannot be touched.

For more than a generation, government really has had no understanding of or need for restraint. That enabled what Tribal described as a financially profligate culture to flourish and today’s members, whether they share any blame for that or not, now have the responsibility to rectify it.

Government has faced tests before – the oil crisis of 1973, the crippling drought of 1976 and horrific unemployment of the early 80s among them.

But this is in a different league and is probably as historically defining a challenge as Occupation was in 1940-45. It is certainly the closest to date to that level of crisis.

Yet this isn’t a rearguard action. It is an opportunity to put the island’s administration on a leaner, more responsive footing and – if the WAO and Tribal findings are followed through – get to a stage where deputies for the first time will be able to demonstrate that they provide value-for-money services.

But, as Deputy Storey’s comment demonstrates, that will happen only when individual departments stop putting their interests first.