It has all the surreal ingredients for a novel by Garcia Marquez: Corpses accumulating at the morgue as hearse owners protest out on the streets, one after the other, in the unlikely company of bellowing yellow buses and red minibuses. Soldiers are stopped and robbed of the keys of their trucks by the angry protestors, who hijack every imaginable form of public transport on sea and land, reaching a peak with the battle of Castille while other comrades blockade the capital.
One man led the resistance on the public front, facing journalists daily in sharp press conferences, keep his head held high and quipping amusing declarations at the toughest times of crisis while manoeuvring what is a veritable funeral for the hearse owners’ monopoly and the drivers’ clout.
Over the last week, Austin Gatt has effectively dug the mass grave of the protected transport sectors – from hearses to minibuses, from taxis to buses.
But perhaps the image of drivers digging their own grave would be truer to what really happened since their federation mounted an impulsive, nation-wide strike, with hearse owners, who emerge as the absolute deserters.
As declared by Gatt himself on the last day of the strike, at the press conference in which the prime minister suddenly appeared out of nowhere, hearses, taxi and minibus drivers ended inadvertently speeding up the liberalisation process.
“I had no particular rush to liberalise taxis and minibuses,” Gatt admits. “They brought it on themselves, so now we’ll keep up the momentum. Hearse owners called me shortly after the election, requesting a meeting with me to discuss pending issues that were never resolved with Jesmond Mugliett. I asked them to give me a couple of months as I knew nothing about hearses and transport. We met after two months, they came to speak to me, and raised the points that were never agreed to with Jesmond. They were unacceptable demands, so I told them I wanted things the other way round: liberalisation.
“Of course they disagreed vociferously, long arguments leading nowhere, so I just told them I’d take it up to Cabinet. They agreed, and asked me how they could influence ministers. I told them to keep doing what they’ve been doing for ages: go to ministers asking them for favours. The liberalisation of hearses was on my mind, but definitely it wasn’t my number one priority. They provoked it. So I took it up to Cabinet, and once we decided I proceeded with it.”
The rest is the story of a four-day tumultuous strike involving all the public transport sectors. I ask him what lessons did he learn from last week’s experience?
“It’s difficult to learn lessons from a strike you don’t know where it came from. I hope the lessons are positive in the sense that we all understand that when the time of change arrives, it arrives for good. It’s useless trying to postpone changes by skirting around the problems we have to solve.”
The truth is, I tell him, that buses, hearses, taxi drivers and mini buses all come from sectors that have always enjoyed protection and half-hearted reforms, and nobody ever dared touching them.
“That’s not completely correct. Historically, transport has always been protected in Europe. It is only in the last years that privatisation of the bus service has started happening, and EU regulations allow you to nationalise the service so that government manages it, or else to break it down and give the contracts by direct order to small companies. The idea of a competitive tendering process is something very new in the EU.”
But irrespective of the nature of the contract, every reform is supposed to bring a better service to the customer, and none of the so-called reforms ever introduced in public transport ever achieved that. In fact bus patronage went down until a year ago.
“I agree perfectly. It’s a question of culture. Bus owners look at their bus as something much more than a bus. I won’t go as far as to say they love them, but it’s like part of their family. I know one aged 76 from Marsa who has some seven buses. He doesn’t need to work because he’s retired, but he still wakes up at 4:30am, and by 5:30am he’s driving his bus. Can you understand that? The problem is that we need a modern bus system that is run by a professional company. We need new, good buses, probably at a higher fare – because 25c to go to Cirkewwa is nothing – but which caters for people’s expectations.”
I tell him it is indicative of his predecessors that they never grabbed the bull by its horns, but Gatt is unmovable when it comes to pointing fingers at previous transport ministers.
“Look, I’m not going to comment about my predecessors, you can comment yourself if you like. That’s what you always do, why don’t you comment yourself?”
There is clearly no need for me to comment. Mugliett himself said last week that the commitment not to issue new licences for motor hearses was not a decision he took on his own.
“Most of the transport sectors abroad are not liberalised, they’re closed markets. This is our decision to liberalise, because the service is not good. Beyond concepts and ideas, we have to build a public transport service – be it taxis, mini vans, coaches, electric taxis, ferries, trams, or buses – that serves the people.”
Yet, the liberalisation of hearses will hardly bring about any improvement to the service or to lower prices. At present, the motor hearses association’s fee for a hearse, a driver and a chauffeur-driven car for the priest is around €116, give or take some minor changes depending on the place where the funeral service is being held. The 10 members of the association get their work through their organisation, which is contacted by the individual undertakers with their requests for hearses. This means that while it is unlikely hearses will lower their prices, it is even more unlikely that undertakers will reflect any decrease in fares in their final price.
“The price of hearses is insignificant to the overall price of a funeral,” Gatt admits. “It’s a very small fraction. That’s why I don’t understand why all this controversy. The bulk of the money is made as a funeral director, and all hearse owners are also funeral directors. So why all the opposition to liberalisation?”
In his press conference shortly after securing the end of the strike and the hearse owners’ resignation from Spiteri’s federation against €230,000 compensation, Gatt said part of the offer will be used for the association’s marketing – a risible prospect given that none of the hearses advertise their services given that they are contracted by funeral directors. When I interviewed him earlier, Bray actually told me they will probably distribute the amount among the 10 members, so they would end up getting like €23,000 each.
“That’s up to them,” Gatt says. “I gave the money to the association, what he does with them is up to them. Mind you this is not the first time we’re offering compensation as part of the liberalisation package. The last case we had was with pig rearers. When we changed the system radically we compensated them to be able to face competition.”
If you had to give compensation to mini-bus owners worked on the same ratio of money per operator, this would amount to €8.9 million. For taxis it would be around €5.7 million.
“It’s not a question of ratios; who told you so? I did not pay individuals, I paid the association. The calculation is partly based on marketing assistance, part on administrative assistance – to beef up internally their own systems – and a sort of ex gratia compensation because of loss of earnings.
“After taxis and minibuses are reformed, work will increase enormously. This is the only country where we have white minivans and red minivans. The white ones are 9 to 14 seaters, and those are already liberalised, so anyone can operate them. From 14 onwards, you need a special licence and it’s a closed shop. What kind of system is this? I don’t care what the colour of your van is, you should just be free to operate it. What I want to say is that everyone should be able to have a minivan.”
What will the net result be?
“Work will increase for whoever is wise enough.”
Will there be a drop in taxi tariffs?
“Taxis have taxi meters. We have to make sure they use them, but meters provide a fixed rate. Liberalisation, the way I want to pursue it, is based on the model found in come countries where everyone uses the taxi meters but if you want to charge less that’s up to you. That’s the kind of liberalisation I’m interested in. Malta is the only country where none of the locals uses taxis. Why? It’s a mix of the price, the attitude, the service. We have to change attitudes.”
About the scheduled bus service, Gatt says the 500-strong fleet needs to be totally replaced with 300 new ones, with low carbon emissions, of various sizes depending on the routes, as well as tram lines.
Gatt says the timeframes for reforming the bus service were agreed to with the drivers even before they went on strike.
“By 2010 we need to have started the tendering process. We’ll start negotiations in 2011, and implement the changes in 2012. Those are the EU’s timelines, and the timelines we have always agreed with drivers.”
Paradoxically, the EU allows both nationalisation of the bus service as well as a private tender to operate a national system, so Gatt will by then have to decide which method to go for.
“What’s important is not so much the method, but the result we want to get,” he says. “What we want is routes that are totally different to what we have today, and that serve the people. We want 300 new buses, over a period of time, a totally different method of selling tickets and increasing patronage, an IT infrastructure to run the system plus professional management. We would have an IT system that informs every bus stage when the next bus is due. We would have a control room from where we would know where every bus is located.
“We want all these independently of whether the service will be privatised or nationalised. For me, these are the priorities, the standards that ADT has to set. Then we have to decide whether to nationalise or privatise.”
Is it acceptable to you that Gozitan drivers do not accept Kartanzjan?
“No, but the Gozitans are the closest to reaching a solution with for an overhaul to the service.”
The irony is that while government was saying there was no strike in Gozo, everyone knows there is effectively no bus service there to begin with.
“There’s no service, it’s true, but remember Gozitans have a world of their own. I know because I’m proud to be half Gozitan. They have more buses than in Malta, per capita. There are more taxis and charge less than in Malta. But the way routes are structured in Gozo makes no sense at all. In the evenings you’d see buses carrying perhaps one passenger. So you need a different operation there.”
Besides drivers, however, Gatt also has to tackle the beleaguered Transport Authority – a veritable nest of corruption and sanctuary of untouchables.
“I’ve already put it under the spotlight,” he says, fully aware of the extent of the problems there. “A particular director who was responsible for licensing and testing has just been removed after some irregularities were observed. There was no corruption, mind you, but the management systems were lacking, so he was removed from director by the board.
“ADT is built on discretionary powers. Most of the decisions can be shifted onto an IT system so they could be taken automatically. The corruption cases are few and far between, considering there are 300 employees. But yes, I will reform ADT radically. The authority’s problems are the same as every other structure that is past its sell-by-date. When the ADT was formed, it was fully manned by civil servants, so they brought with them the idea of bureaucracy. Also, unfortunately, several governments ended up transferring whoever it had a problem with to ADT. So you have bus conductors at ADT, bus inspectors, dispatchers – all those who weren’t needed were dumped there. Having said that, there is a nucleus of highly professional people, good foot-soldiers, who give their best to the authority. But when it comes to the higher management levels: those involved in forward planning, strategy, policies and their implementation and audits – those are lacking.”
I tell Gatt there are persistent rumours that he is spreading the word that he won’t contest the election again.
“Don’t we have enough rumours already?
Is it true you said so?
“Probably while I was at the counting hall. You know, after all that hassle, that’s what I always say.”
Do you mean it?
“I probably said it, but who knows what I’ll be doing in five years’ time?”
Reason I ask is: You already have an image of being the government’s cowboy. If you won’t stand up for a vote again you’re bound to turn into a full western movie by the end of the legislature.
“What are you coming up with? I honestly planned a very calm summer, and it has been disrupted. Were it not for this strike I would be sunbathing in Marsalforn. They ruined my holiday! At least now I can go for the weekend. So leave me alone and don’t give me all this!”