Evarist Bartolo | Sunday, 22 March 2009

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The best government on earth

A Eurostat report issued in June 2007 concluded that the highest increases in the overall tax burden in the 27 European Union member states were observed in Cyprus (from 26.7% to 35.6%) and Malta (from 27.3% to 35.3%). Another Eurostat report published last Friday showed that Maltese workers’ wages and salaries saw the lowest rise in the European Union between the third and fourth quarters of last year. Wages and salaries in Malta only rose by 0.7 per cent, in a period when the island went into official recession.
The PN government wants us to believe that we are living in fairyland. While the rest of the world is being hit hard by the global financial and economic crisis, in Malta and Gozo we are living happily ever after: jobs are increasing by the thousands and new investment is pouring in. Anything that does not fit in this rosy picture is ignored. So tourism is not down and jobs in manufacturing have not been lost and it is not true that people have less money with which to buy products and services for their families. People at home and in their businesses are not being painfully hit by the rise in water and electricity as Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi announces that it is with great joy and pleasure that he is to vote in favour of his government’s decision to increase the bills of these essential services. What a kind heart he has, God bless him!
We must not be negative, the PN says. We must not speak up for the thousands burdened unfairly by €50 million worth of VAT on top of the registration tax when they bought a car in the last five years, since we joined the European Union. We must be positive. We must not speak up for the thousands of people who have been on the waiting lists for operations for years at our ‘state of the art’ public hospital. We must be positive. We must not speak up for the thousands of children and young people who are leaving our schools unskilled and unqualified. We must be positive. We must not speak up against the way the PN poured scorn over gay rights in parliament and the steps taken recently to ban the play ‘Stitching’ and to terminate the contract of Dr Patrick Attard for expressing himself openly in a newspaper blog. We must bow our heads and not say that we are reminded more of Iran and Saudi Arabia than a European country when police charge Christian Mizzi of Graffiti for an ‘obscene’ word in a late night activity in Valletta and a young man at the carnival in Nadur for breaking an outdated law.
We must be positive says the PN. We must not remind people that in the general elections of a year ago it got less than 50% of the 290,799 who cast their votes. 143,468 voted for the PN. We must not remind people that after an electoral campaign where the PN promised heaven on earth, gave jobs and promotions, granted building permits, handed out tax exemptions, deceived voters by promising everything to everyone and brought over thousands of voters who did not have the constitutional right to vote, there were still 147,331 who voted against the PN, 3,863 more than those who voted for the PN.
We must be positive, the PN says, and must not accuse it of running the country like a one-party state behind a façade of a multi-party parliamentary democracy, imposing its decisions and riding roughshod over all those who disagree with it and only doing U-turns to deal with fierce internal opposition. We must be grateful for small mercies: the offer to appoint persons from the Labour ranks to the largely symbolic offices of the Speaker of Parliament and the President of the Republic while PN cronies continue to grab all top posts in government departments and public sector organisations where real power is wielded
We must be positive says the PN. We must not accuse the Prime Minister of doing exactly the opposite of what he said a year ago after the general election results: “Let us not speak of winners and losers but about a country getting stronger and moving forward. We will be the government of all Maltese people, we are just one big family, and we do not have the luxury of dividing the country into two states. Nobody must lag behind. I will embrace the Opposition with open arms in dialogue.”
The PN uses all its energy on securing power and holding on to it and does not care about the pain it is inflicting on many working and middle class families. But we must be positive and fall on our knees and thank our lucky stars that we are being cared for impeccably by the best government in the entire universe.

evaristbartolo@hotmail.com

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