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Karl Schembri
He might come out as a weak and hesitant Prime Minister on the media, but in front of dozens of government chairmen and chief executives, Lawrence Gonzi made it clear that he meant business last Thursday.
Chairmen and CEOs from the 47 state entities convened by the Prime Minister in Castille for a two-hour meeting Thursday morning speak of an “assertive” Gonzi who intends “cutting the frills” and making them “work more for less.” Some describe his speech preceding Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech’s PowerPoint presentation as “persuasive,” others as “bullyish,” while still others felt he was “barking up the wrong tree.” One chairman said the Prime Minister’s tone reminded him of Dom Mintoff.
“I’m being brash intentionally (Qed inkun goff apposta),” he said repeatedly to the top people from entities ranging from the mammoth Malta Enterprise to the Manoel Theatre Committee who gathered inside what is known as Amabassadors’ Room. “I want to take you all on board.”
“His message was basically ‘take it or leave it – whoever is not with me is against me’,” one chairman told MaltaToday. “It was as if he was telling us, ‘forget all the crap they say out there about me being weak and undecided’ in reaction to public perception.”
“He called on every one of us to take ownership of our ideas,” a chief executive said, adding that the generic nature in which Gonzi spoke could hardly generate any disagreement in principle. “Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with his wish to seek more efficiency. The problem is whether he’ll manage to cut the deficit through such patchwork.”
In essence, his message conveyed nothing new. Veiled under Gonzi’s pet language of “social justice” was the finance minister’s obsession with the bottom-line: reducing the ballooning budget deficit at all costs. He also admitted that the people’s perception was that they were “not getting value for money.”
Concretely, he announced the setting up of a unit within his finance ministry that would monitor each entity’s budget, from the conception of the yearly business plan to actual spending. There will be no concessions for exceeding the allocated budget; overtime and bonuses will be closely monitored; water, telephone and electricity bills will be vetted; performance allowances will have to be justified; collective agreements will have to be harmonised, especially when it comes to salaries; redeployment of government workers will take precedence over employment of new people.
Insisting on the need for coordination, Gonzi mentioned a case when an employee received early retirement from one government entity (apparently PBS) and was compensated accordingly but started working with another government entity. The Prime Minister insisted that the employee should either have been re-deployed or retired, but not taken a post and the money for early retirement.
One chairman, somehow annoyed, recalled the Prime Minister’s remark that he had the authority to remove or transfer any chairman as he deemed fit.
Another one commented positively about Gonzi’s promise that should an entity not use all of its allocated budget by the end of the financial year, its budget the following year would not diminish.
“That’s a good way to cut the end-of-the-year rush at some entities to spend the entire budget so that they won’t end up with budget cuts the following year,” the chairman said.
For the public at large, however, Gonzi remains politically weak in the wake of the Brussels property controversy, which cost the government almost half of the extra Lm18.6 million spent over last year’s budget for a nine-storey building opposite the European Commission that will house Permanent Representative Richard Cachia Caruana and his entourage.
He defended the decision yet again in a hastily-called press conference on the staircase to his office after the closed-door meeting last Thursday, adding that he would not reverse it as it was “an investment for the country … the best possible acquisition,” that would generate revenue if the building had to be resold.
Also, Gonzi’s plans to curb public expenditure will not be targeting the myriad government consultants who remain employed after retirement, occupying posts that could be filled with new blood.
When MaltaToday quizzed him about the consultants the reply was that such people were kept “to remain active in the economy” after pensionable age, although this privilege is only limited to people from scale five upwards.
At the same time, the Mater Dei Hospital seems already doomed to be a drain on the national budget, years before it even starts accepting its first patients at monthly multi-million liri running costs.
At Lm175.6 million, Malta's budget deficit ballooned to 9.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) last year, triple the limit set by the European Union, mainly because of unfettered public expenditure. To be able to adopt the Euro, the government will need to reduce the deficit to below 3 per cent of GDP and its debt to below 60 per cent, according to EU rules.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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