The fall guy in the fees-for-health policy proposal which, at least briefly, had been discussed by senior ministers with the prime minister, is a ministry official who last Thursday was asked to sign an affidavit, stressing his guilt in (a) proposing that health services should be charged; and (b) misrepresenting Cabinet’s sentiment when writing that they “agreed in principle” with introducing fees for public health services.
In 2004 his proposal paper was four years away from being published by the Opposition leader right in the middle of an electoral race, which outed the PM as having been rather economical with the truth: his ministers had discussed introducing fees and the PM’s categorical denial had been untrue, or a mistake – he didn’t know Alfred Sant had the policy paper. It turns out, in Ray Xerri’s affidavit, that his heretical doctrine to charge fees had never even made it to Cabinet, refuted by Louis Galea before this maniac’s fiscal conservative lunacy infects the minds of some finance-conscious zealots.
Sant’s bombshell laid Gonzi open to accusations of not saying the truth when asked whether Cabinet had discussed the financing of public healthcare. They did, or at least health minister Louis Deguara did in July 2004 in a paper he presented to Cabinet in which he warned that unless funding problems get resolved, services will be curtailed and the health status of the nation would be jeopardised (page 18 – Cabinet Memo 77).
Indeed Deguara has not uttered a single word this week of the ‘spirit’ that possessed him when warning the Cabinet that public healthcare had to carry some costs for its sustainability. Instead it had to be his own official to carry the can – and humiliatingly so, having been forced to take ownership of the sins of our elected representatives for not admitting to discuss the financing of healthcare. For Gonzi’s failure to concede that ‘yes – the financial sustainability of our country’s health system was discussed in these terms but we decided against it’, a public servant is made to own up for his evil fiscal mania.
Not his minister of course. No, Louis Deguara only said those words… but did he really say them? He sort of warned Cabinet of funding problems… but did he really warn them? He is the health minister after all… but is he really?

After all, Xerri’s well argued proposal suggested that consumers take some ownership of their very own NHS, to know fully the costs incurred for the care of their health and, in his words, establish “a social contract” between State and citizen. By paying for certain services, we get the right to know where and how our money is spent. It is basic democracy.
It’s for that reason that we pay tax in Malta. On the contrary in Dubai, where our government ministers and opposition MPs and their dust-mongering contractor mates like to cosy up with its CEOs and IT-princes, the Al Maktoum dynasty does not collect any tax on personal income, such is the expanse of its oil wealth. Hence, no democracy. Who needs your vote when they don’t even need your money?

The MEPA auditor Joe Falzon was another public servant whose report on the Polidano supermarket, published last Wednesday, gave Alternattiva Demokratika a silver bullet right when they needed it, in the middle of an electoral race.
Cunning? Shrewd? Devious? Wily? You could attribute any foxy euphemism to the mind of the planning ombudsman and you wouldn’t be wrong in not being a naïve fool. The timing of the report’s publication, finding the DCC board of having taken “the law into their own hands”, and prompting their resignation en masse the day it is published, seems intended to do maximum damage.
If anything, MEPA’s most popular public servant is independent-minded. Only two weeks ago, he publicly deplored his former underling, AD candidate Carmel Cacopardo, for publishing an unofficial draft of the audit into the Sant Antnin waste plant “for political motives”.
Now however, Falzon has shown his office’s muscle in following up a complaint and deliver a reasoned interpretation of policy without the aid of investigating officer Cacopardo – so reviled by the government bureaucracy. Falzon’s office has teeth then.
Even reading the DCC’s own justification of its decision, conveys the spirit that it actively accommodated the siting of the Polidano supermarket on ODZ land just because the nearby villages of Kirkop, Safi, Zurrieq, Qrendi and Mqabba had no commercial areas large enough in the first place.
They not only ignored the planning directorate’s view that the project was unacceptable in principle; they actually took the trouble of justifying an alternative location for a supermarket when the matter should have been taken to the MEPA board.
Irrespectively of the report’s timing, Falzon is a champion of the fair and just application of planning laws. To leave him languishing now just because his damning indictment of the DCC board (with effective results) is so rudely untimely for the incumbent government, would be tantamount to undermining the principles of fairness and justice most of us believe in.
There is no election to which we should sacrifice the morality of upholding planning policies and laws. Somewhere along the line, we have to stand up for these principles which feature nowhere inside the country’s GDP figures.