Will we curb our great expectations?

After all, Deputies Andrea Dudley-Owen, Al Brouard and Rob Prow, jointly responsible for spending about £300m. of taxpayers’ money every year, say they’ve never heard anyone call to cut nurses, teachers and police officers from the public sector.

Whether their plea is solely to maintain their own cash limits, they do also make the point that nowhere, bar the GST option, will lower-paid islanders potentially get a better deal from the Tax Review.

But the challenge for government – and, by extension, islanders – this week remains to decide what it really wants from government.

Warnings over essential services will still be seen as scaremongering, just as we had threats to close hospital wards and schools earlier on in the debate, which P&R appears now to have stopped making.

But the real concerns are the level of spend across government, including the terms and conditions that see the cost of the public sector ever-increasing, combined with islanders’ desire to have the best public services, mixed with the unrealistic expectation of receiving that at next-to-no-cost.

Until we can resolve that issue, the Tax Review debate remains a binary choice which lands us with GST, or takes us nowhere fast.