Finance minister and deputy leader, Audley Shaw, in addressing a party Area Council one meeting in Kingston on Sunday, gave strong indications that the party is already preparing for the next elections due in 2012.

Shaw said the JLP, which won the elections in September 2007, was faced with the mammoth task of bringing the country back from the brink that the People’s National Party (PNP) took it to, when they were in power from 1989 to 2007.

In fact, Shaw said, “We need more time to fix the problems facing the country,” – a theme the party will more than likely use in their campaign for re-election.

He said the PNP left the country “in such serious trouble that we can’t fix it in five years”. He called their 18-year run a period of mismanagement and pledged that from now until the next election he will work to ensure that Jamaicans “understand the full extent of the problem that we are facing".

Shaw, in boosting his party’s ability to find solutions said the PNP lacked the courage to come up with ideas that could help the country progress, reiterating that the JLP needs more time to fix the “problems are so vast, so wide, and so deep”.

He asked that Jamaicans remember what the JLP inherited, when they are making criticisms of the country’s current state of affairs.