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This time last year the Minister of Finance had cracked the whip over the heads of his Cabinet colleagues passing on to them any responsibility for any failure to comply with the recently announced belt-tightening exercise. It had sounded like exasperation. Being the Minister of Finance with Prime Ministerial ambitions facing the publication of an austerity budget was not an ideal situation.
The Minister of Finance was shedding ministerial responsibility and passing the buck to Cabinet responsibility. He had tried and failed before. Before, he had tried in private. His 1995 memorandum to his colleagues describing the dire straits of public finances had only been revealed once the MLP took office in 1996. John Dalli had had it up to here with his colleagues’ overspending and devil may care expense planning. He also wanted to make sure that he would not be the only one catching public flak for belt-tightening.
Lawrence Gonzi has a great advantage over his predecessor. He does not suffer the constraints of a need for pre-electoral deception. Major cost-cutting exercises were hard to carry out when the government Party needed to keep up appearances. The public could not be made fully aware and the spenders of government funds could not be made as clearly aware of the urgency to economise.
Just imagine the Prime Minister or the Minister of Finance calling a meeting of the heads of government quangos to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear on them as recently as 2 years ago. Neither of his predecessors in his two roles could have called such a meeting; certainly not in public.
It still seems a bit odd today even if it is not a cataclysmic revelation once we are all already aware of the government’s economic difficulties. But why should it be public opinion that should do the trick? Why is the Prime Minister-cum-Minister of Finance unable to have a head to head talk with these people and give them a shape-up-or-ship-out ultimatum? Are their contracts unrelated to performance?
The publicity of the whole thing is perceptibly theatrical. The top brass was marched up to the big room in Castille for a photograph. The Prime Minister was not talking to them. He could have sent them a stiff group e-mail. He was talking to us.
The message is: “Look how hard I am trying. If I do not succeed it is the fault of these blighters or of soaring oil prices, not mine.” It has been a constant PN parry. Everybody but the people in charge is to blame. The Castille conclave was original in preparing the ground for a future “I told you so.” The Prime Minister too has sloping shoulders. He matches the rest of the power pyramid that leaves all the unpleasantness to gather at the bottom.
The meeting comes soon after the Cabinet conclave at Girgenti. Apparently the big room at Castille is not big enough for all the ministers to meet when something momentous is to be discussed. The meeting was made extraordinarily important by giving everyone the inconvenience of traveling out to the countryside and creating all the hooha about which Minister arrived with whom and who left last. The press was primed and the Prime Minister held his press conference which was the main object of the performance. He tried to steal a march on the social partners and went home.
It is all television politics. Was the Prime Minister in a dark suit or wearing his short-sleeved shirt? The gurus who built his predecessor through PR expertise cannot give up on the idea that PR is not everything. All the veils are down and the PR is worse than useless. We can see the strings and the hands that pull them. We are all experts in PR tricks. This is not 1989 when we may have been credulous or innocent. It is 2004, the year that Aznar lost an election by attempting to pull a fast PR trick. The electorate is faster than PR gurus think it is.
What we all crave is authenticity, something real, not done for the cameras. We need to be able to believe. We can no longer be expected to suspend disbelief because we are faithful to the government party. Nor can the other half of us be ignored even as its outrage is provoked further. We want a Prime Minister that can talk to the whole country.
At a time when we feel that all our futures are at stake regardless of Party affiliation we do not want to hear the Prime Minister justify the presence of the PN Secretary General at the Girgenti conclave. Informing his party of government decisions is a private affair. Joe Saliba had no business there. It became a PN affair not a meeting of the government of Malta.
It appears that the PR gurus have no self-awareness. They do not seem to realize how damning it is that we can see the hands pulling the strings. They have seriously debilitated Lawrence Gonzi at a time when we desperately need a Prime Minister who can make us believe the impossible. The PR theatricals remind us that the game is all about looking good and winning the next election, not about something inescapably convincing.
The purchase of the Brussels embassy could not have come at a worse time. The mention of an ostentatious expense of Lm9M in the same breath as cost-cutting exercises makes it all unreal. It feels like the ban on civil service Christmas parties in 2003: an insolent sham. The “good investment” pitch still makes no sense. Either the government has a surplus to invest or it has to cut costs to defeat the deficit.
With soaring oil prices likely to add further spanners in the works, every million beyond the absolutely necessary spent on the Brussels embassy is going to look like sheer prodigality. Apart from the actual financial burden, it is a huge morale deflater. Its cost is unquantifiable, but immense. The damage done to Lawrence Gonzi as Prime Minister may be irreparable. So far he is adamant in its defense and the government’s apologists likewise.
He is still not clear about the Mater Dei hospital. He has asked the principal contractors for a delivery date and a final invoice. Are we to believe that the government has sailed through in complete ignorance all these years? Just to add to the fun it was hinted that it might cost more to pull out of the project than to proceed with it. Who wrote that contract? Who signed it? Can the PN and MLP continue to blame one another indefinitely and escape responsibility? We have a worrying estimate of what the running costs will be, but that is still just an estimate. Lawrence Gonzi is asking in public to let us know that he did not know.
What we need is not a series of PR exercises, but a serious plan. The target should not be simply meeting the Masstricht criteria and entering the Eurozone. To ordinary people it means very little. It cannot begin to justify the human cost. We need to know that we have a plan. We need to know why our belts have stopped us breathing and government debt is not a good enough reason.
The country needs to have a common vision, not the government’s haze and not the Opposition’s. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to appear to checkmate the opposition parties by offering them a place it cannot give them on the MCESD during a Xarabank broadcast. The Greens accepted and called the government’s bluff. The government has to do something real.
The country needs a truce to be able to form a common strategy. No single Party government appears capable of offering a solution on its own because it is inevitably half the problem. The government needs to forget about PR exercises and put a hand out to opposition parties. It must be something that the MLP cannot refuse. Does the MLP really want to govern the economic desert it will cause through eternal resistance? The Greens ask only for democracy.
The only obstacle is misplaced pride and the bad habit of keeping up appearances through futile PR exercises. Our problem is not economic. It is political, metaphysical, mental. It can be solved in a few words, a change in attitude. It is further from solution than vanishing our Lm 1 Bln national debt or ending the deficit.
harry.vassallo@alternattiva.org.mt
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