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It has been such an unspectacular year apart from the bill we were made to pay for the 1 May celebrations. I am finally a European citizen but I feel no different to last year. Do you?
The platoon of blue eyed boys and girls who installed themselves in European institutions in grey and rainy Brussels are all very content and feel very different.
What do you think about our government’s escapade in the world of property deals in the asbestos palace in Brussels? It was one of Bertu Mizzi’s finest hours in his role as a property consultant. We have heard that this Lm9 million property, equivalent to the annual budget for all Maltese local councils, will leave this government many thousands in rental returns.
So I now I see the rationale.
But if government is looking for revenues, why does it insist to sell Maltacom and Bank of Valletta if they are making millions in profits every year? Probably I am missing the plot or I am simply a moron.
Bertie Mizzi, the scourge of the Nationalist party before 1987, has now been genetically modified to a kind of nice sort of guy, thanks to the cuddly make-up intensive interviews by the too-young-to-remember-who-Bertie-Mizzi-was-before-1987 journalist Pierre Portelli.
This has been a grand year for the quick fixes. The eco-tax and the excuse that the monies collected will go to sponsor waste management; the end of Maghtab until we noticed that this was not really the case; the smoking ban across the board, from the cigar bars in Paceville where Havana cigars are sold for up to Lm60, to the minuscule tea bars where 80-year old pensioners flailing brownish-yellow fingers buy a tea for 10c and a toast for 15c and are forced to take a smoke on the pavement.
Then we had the unforgettable trouncing of the Nationalist Party in the June European Parliament elections, interpreted by the apologists as an unacceptably silly, selfish action by spoilt Nationalists. None of these Nationalists were of course recipients of consultancies and government contracts.
It was a wonderfully remarkable public relations disaster to put a surcharge on water and electricity for the absolute wrong reason.
Malta is no richer than last year, no happier and less exciting than ever before. And yet with the lowest economic growth in Europe, the government insists we are moving on.
Moving where? is the question.
Our national airline has stopped providing passengers with Maltese newspapers unless you happen to be insane enough to purchase an overpriced club class ticket. If you happen to fancy a double Cognac at 37,000 feet then you have to fork out a fiver.
They call such measures restructuring.
In my younger days we used to call it simply by its name: ‘TAL-QAMEL’.
The old faces on national TV are no more (apart from the Alfred Sant bashers screened on Tuesday and Friday evening), and the newer faces offer none of the enticing visage of the old presenters.
The new buzzword from politicians is sacrifices. But sacrifice is a repetitive and annoying imposition developed by politicians who pass on everything they have concocted on to the unfortunate middle classes.
The joke of the year, has to go to the hospital they called Mater Dei. This is our national cement sculpture to mismanagement that you will eventually discover is no one’s responsibility. But if you want to find a scapegoat you definitely have to point a finger at Alfred Sant and not at Louis Deguara.
Well, the good news is that the hospital will cost us millions more and will be operational on the 1 July 2007. Some seventeen solid years after the first foundation stone. Wow, and guess what the Prime Minister will be celebrating his birthday on that day.
If someone was unwell with the media in 2004, it had to be Richard (RCC), who lost countless brownie points for the Dar Malta in Brussels purchase and many more points for his Mdina duckie pond on a grade A conservation area.
Yet if Ritchie slipped from his high altar at the office of the Prime Minister, Alan Camilleri, Gonzi’s stiff public relations officer relegated himself to Division four status with his unbelievably arrogant and public relation disaster emails to newspaper editors.
Call me a nasty guy, but why should public broadcasting have as prime time on a Tuesday evening a programme on ageing rock stars? Why should hundreds of liri of taxpayers’ money be sucked up to bring us footage of a fading rock star from an event organised by the same presenter of this programme?
A musical documentary of little local significance apart from those who think Mister Steve Hackett (unknown to 99% of all Maltese) is of particular significance.
If there is a holy time in public broadcasting, then it has to be the slot between eight thirty and ten in the evening. This is when, supposedly, thousands of Maltese who pay their taxes to watch current affairs programmes and intelligent debates on national television are force fed by the same presenters over and over again, instead of having lively topics on national issues.
The last time this kind of one-track programme was aired was also on a Tuesday and with the same chap. Then we were made to suffer a programme calling itself by the surreal title of ‘gurnalizmu fuq kollox’ on Tuscany’s culinary delights, coincidentally in the same locality where the former PBS chairman has an abode.
I am not quite sure if (Fr) Joe Borg, the editorial consultant for national TV, considers these audio-visual productions in the remit of the obligations of national broadcasting. But then even if he did I do not expect him to dig up a fuss.
What should be more significant is what Agius Muscat, the 30-year old PBS chairman picked for his managerial skills in the bacon, sausage and chicken industry has to say about such productions.
Until now when it comes to editorial content, he has very much followed in the footsteps of his predecessors.
Which is basically doing un bel zero about editorial content and direction.
Understandably I cannot avoid commeneting abou the annual charade for charity by the way of a longish list of shameless lotteries. It is not charity that is the problem.
The issue is that we have set a standard. We, well some, have led most Maltese to believe that donations to charitable organisations come with the chance of winning prizes .
Why cannot we simply donate to charity without participating in this circus of shame?
The reason, I guess, is because we are heathens, consumer oriented bums and we will only endeavour to give something if we get something in return.
Today for endless hours and televised nationally, people will flock in hordes like mad sheep to register their presence in a playing field to give something to the under-privileged.
In this hour of false humility and telling pseudo altruism I can only think of all the nameless volunteers working in the cold desert in Darfur in Sudan, working tirelessly without payment and recognition for the dying and the starving.
They depend on the monies of anonymous folk who give because they believe they should give and not out of greed to win a prize or to advertise the benevolence of their business firm. If they chance to watch this show in between dying infants, they should not be blamed if they held their heads in their hands and wondered why charity has turned into such a cabaret.
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