Minister of Finance and the Public Service Audley Shaw enters Jamaica House in St Andrew yesterday afternoon for a final Cabinet meeting before he opens the Budget Debate 2008/2009 in Parliament today. - Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer

IN TAXIS, on the buses, in the streets, everywhere, the cry is the same: Food prices are too high and the dollar cannot stretch.

It is a cry with which Audley Shaw is familiar. When the Jamaica Labour Party was in opposition, he would passionately take this cry to the hallowed chamber of Parliament to shame the government and offer a better alternative.

Shaw is now the finance minister and today he opens the Budget Debate at Gordon House. From all indications, he will be strolling to the crease with a scandal bat, but he has to be measured by his stroke play.

He has to tell the country how he plans to finance his $489.5 billion Budget. Also, the new finance minister will have to create a comfort zone for Jamaicans, who are experiencing massive increases in the cost of basic food.

Food prices have gone even farther skywards since 2006 when Shaw told the nation, in his contribution to the Budget debate in his capacity as opposition spokesman on finance, that it was "time to choose".

This is what he said then: "...While the prices of basic food continue to rise, traders are reporting a 10-15 per cent fall-off in business over last year, due to reduced purchasing power among the people whose disposable income is ravaged by wage freeze, higher fuel prices, escalating electricity costs, and the unavailability of cement."

Today, Shaw's 2006 lamentations will come from the other side of the aisle.