Anyone who has seen the Prime Minister recently would have noticed that he is no longer surrounded by his ageing ministers but rather, by his new band of so-called youngish looking candidates. It is supposed to be a subliminal message, noticed by the discerning eye. And if Gonzi was really serious about new looks, he would change the Cabinet and not offer token changes with new faces. In discussing finance with Finance Malta, he discarded his junior finance minister Tonio Fenech and dragged Georg and Clyde along. But the last thing we would really hope for is for Georg as finance minister. Can you imagine? Minister Sapiano? Yesterday it was splashed and spun on The Times and according to Mr Joe Saliba, these people are selected on the very impressive criterion known as expertise. The other day it was Georg Sapiano and Clyde Puli. Not exactly fresh faces. The former is a lawyer who has accumulated innumerably lucrative government retainers he was awarded in the last years from the Nationalists. No wonder he knows something about finance. And the latter is an MP and top public relations officer with the publicly funded Foundation for Medical Services, to be remembered for the absent PR campaign on Mater Dei before Dr Lawrence Gonzi came along. Mater Dei has a lot to do with finances surely. It cost us over Lm250 million. Great expertise, I guess. The PM has been advised to look younger. But he should remember there are things you can do and others you should never do. Dumping the ministers for younger faces for example, is not always a guarantee for success. It doesn’t quite sound right. Monsignor Sapiano yes, but not Minister. And then I guess Sapiano’s most worrying moment would be when he would have to downgrade himself for a smaller ministerial BMW than his beastly and big beamer; more worryingly he would have to give up his retainers, clients and business interests all for the sake of that noble and altruistic profession we know by the name of POLITICS. If there is one good reason to stop buying Kullhadd and Il-Mument, it’s not just because people are opting for the Maltese-language ILLUM every Sunday, as the surveys show. Traditionally, advertising agencies have been the ones who have least had faith in Maltese-language newspapers, and that is because most of the executives do not read Maltese. But ILLUM has taken off and reached new heights. And this Sunday is a must, because ILLUM has one of those riveting stories that confirms what we always thought. It shows how building contractor and Nationalist diehard Zaren Vassallo, who at present is being hounded by the Labour press and the MLP, has only recently donated Lm5,000 through one of his companies to the Labour party. It confirms our worst fears, that even Nationalist big boys give money to the opposition, and that the Labour party finds no problem hitting out at the people who give them money for their electoral campaign. I guess it takes place the other way round too, but Labour has no sense at all when it comes to battling on the front and confirms how good it is in scoring auto-goals. No great shakes but the government has sold 25% of its shares in Maltapost to Lombard Bank. The bank’s chief, Joe Said, who usually shuns the press and works quietly behind the scenes announced on TVM in rather awkward Maltese that Maltapost would be looking to offer new services such as banking and funds. As the minister smiled and shook hands with the ever nervous Said, everyone must have been asking themselves: is this the final adieu to the postal service we once knew? To be fair to Mr Said, he has nothing to do with the way the postal service in Malta has evolved into the proverbial snail mail service. Gone are the days when we would be proud of our Maltese postal service and receive post on time. Today post offices may be done up to the whims of expensive interior designers but there are less smiles and the old and nostalgic cuddly service we once knew is gone. To pick up a parcel, you either have to phone or email, and then pencil in your diary when to pick up the parcel at the stipulated time. The last time my nonagenarian great-aunt received some present from her sister in Australia, I purposely avoided explaining what electronic mail is all about. It would have sent her to the other world. Maltese post offices are today understaffed but hardworking men and women are still manning the offices, usually typified by never-ending queues. And to make some extra dosh, the post offices compete with the small village bookshop – who by the way sweat it out to breakeven – by selling stationery. Mr Said talked of offering some sort of banking service. Little does he know that the banking services offered in most postal services in France, Germany and the Benelux countries have a touch of social conscience in them. In Holland, I recall Monty Python’s John Cleese promoting the post’s giro accounts in adverts on TV and bus stops. The banking services in post offices normally earmark the student population and the pensioners in either big cities or remote villages. These do not leave amazing profits to the postal service. Indeed postal services in these countries offer banking services as part of their corporate social responsibility. Now, I am not quite sure if Mr Said has become a benevolent patrician like his mentor Uncle Bertie. In the limited time I had for the great pleasure of working for Mr Said at The Independent I always remember him as someone who repeatedly talked about the need to have a bottom-line approach to things. And it is exactly the bottom-line that should not be applied to the postal services in Malta. Mr Said, who has a small but significant commercial interest in the competing postal company UPS, will surely not apply the same principle to Maltapost. Money after all is not everything to him. Indeed in his list of priorities it ranks somewhere in the fourth division. If anyone wants to make money, they should not do it with our postal services. This government prides itself in having thrown away millions, three hundred-something to be precise, to sustain the dockyard and its workers. But then it was unwilling to sustain the postal services. Well, the thousands of Maltese who pray for a reliable service do not have the same clout as the burly dockyard workers who have held this country to ransom for donkeys’ years. Instead there were attempts in the past to privatise the post’s management by giving it to New Zealanders and they fared very… Zealandish, by literally sending our postal services so haywire it would take a letter longer to get to Gozo than to Auckland. Government has an obligation to sustain the postal services. Needless to say I can just imagine Minister Austin Gatt’s answer to a question on obligations and vital services. I will leave it our readers’ imagination. Last week, a MaltaToday journalist asked Labour MP and party spokesperson for the environment Roderick Galdes a set of questions about hunting. He said he would answer them by email and he did, only to put all his answers together in one disjointed riposte and reissue the joined up answers as a press release on the same day. It was the same old hogwash about the government promising that it would change nothing and do nothing to reduce the hunting period. That was 2003. It is 2007 and life goes on. Mr Galdes should try to understand that what people really want from the Labour party are proposals not knee-jerk reactions. Does he agree with regulating hunting abuses? Yes or no? And if he does, why does he not agree with the new regulations which impose a moratorium to ensure that hunters do not do what they always do, that is, shoot at protected birds? sbalzan@mediatoday.com.mt