Editorial • 3 August 2003

The silly season

The heat wave that brought on the two hottest months in living memory should not be blamed for it. That the media received a short Department of Information note that there were no activities worth media attention yesterday, we can live with.
It is the middle of summer and a favourite time for holidays. But all this, and we’re sure countless other excuses can be found, is no good reason for the country to come to a halt.
Everyone deserves a holiday, but perhaps we should consider, like the Italians have done with Ferragosto, giving it a name and declaring it official, so that the public will learn not to expect too much from its representatives and officials from June to September.
With the euphoria from EU membership and election victory over and full-knowing our responsibilities for the coming years, we expected some ministries to go into overdrive.
We need to take a cue from Edward deBono and engage in some creative, or lateral thinking to push this country ahead.
The waste minister has taken some decisions, the finance minister has informed us of our financial position and we have promises of a transport shake up. Precious little as a start for the years that promised to be the ones when much needed radical decisions are taken and standards brought up to EU level.
The problem with governmental holidaying, as is with personal holidays, is that the problems don’t go away. Come September, when hopefully the silly season will come to a close, we will still wake up to the same deficit problems, lack of tourism revenue, dust-infested potholed roads, narrow minded administrators who don’t make bureaucracy any easier, a government that still toes the Church’s line excessively and countless other problems. No magic wand will drive our worries away.
If we are not going to be ‘active’ we might as well be debating, and surely the time has come to debate issues of major concern. The least the ministries could do in this relaxed season is present their public with the plans and priorities for the coming years. A sort of business plan that every competent company prepares at the beginning of a new venture.
The GRTU and MHRA have incessantly reminded us of the fragility of the tourism sector, but where is the evidence that we are about to make Malta a tourism destination worth its salt?
Prior to the election there was much talk on the importance of environmental issues over the coming years, but where is the minister now?
Some activities need to be speeded up. It is certainly unacceptable, for example, that an important road is kept closed for four months when employing workers on a shift basis would have speeded the work up and cut the completion time by half. The financial cost admittedly would have been greater, but the advantages of opening the road earlier would outweigh the costs.
If Malta is going to retain the mediocre standards that we have had over the past decades we can safely conclude that EU membership was not worth it. We have to look at other European countries and learn to take the best from them.
There are fine examples of educational systems, tax regimes, welfare states, administration of justice, health services, social laws, tourism planning, public transport, environmental protection, healthier agriculture out there and all we have to do is learn from them.