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Karl Schembri
In the hall usually reserved for meetings with foreign ambassadors and high-ranking dignitaries, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi embarked on his project to listen to the public in Castille last Wednesday evening.
It is perhaps a positive side-effect of the electoral beatings he has faced in his first year at Castille, but my hunch is that he was inspired by Pope Benedict who said at his inauguration that instead of presenting a programme of government, he would “listen to the world”. Gonzi was there and the Bavarian Pontiff known as God’s Rotweiller who, like him, had no honeymoon period, must have struck a chord with the former President of Azzjoni Kattolika.
But a more secular inspiration may have been Tony Blair’s electoral ploy of listening to the people in an electoral exercise of political catharsis in the run-up to the UK general elections. I remember PN Secretary Genaral Joe Saliba praising Blair’s campaign after I had interviewed him when he was under attack for retreating from the Zejtun and Marsa local elections last March, but at that time I had thought the PN would be unable to handle such a popular purgatory.
It turned out to be nothing of the sort. The hall was no scene of drama or headline-grabbing outbursts of anger. Super One journalist Charlon Gouder found it hard to stay awake.
The prime minister’s aides were somewhat nervous before it all started, insisting with journalists not to identify speakers in their reports and to leave out personal information.
They apparently feared an onslaught of private experiences and problems. Former PBS news anchor Anna Bonanno, who chaired the session, underlined this by insisting repeatedly to speakers to ‘be generic’ and only speak of their particular problems privately to secretaries on the side who were ready to take note of them.
That was unfortunate. Indeed, the most interesting interventions regarded particular problems of those who spoke through the malfunctioning cordless microphones, although the two-minute allowance made by the chairperson for every speaker evoked scenes of Peppi Azzopardi stopping his guests in the middle of an argument for commercials.
On the face of it, the 27 or so interventions sounded like comments made by disgruntled Nationalists, pale blue voters and sensible middle class citizens who just want things to be run as they should. From misplaced bus stops and stopped clocks at bus terminals to unfair pensions and shocking property prices.
One complained that it took him an hour to arrive by bus from San Gwann to Valletta.
Another one complained that honest businessmen were being penalised by a system that was prompting fiscal evasion and illegal practices.
More than one complained of the arrogance of ministers and civil servants.
“Civil servants have become gods,” one complained.
“Even magistrates and judges,” another one said.
“And local wardens”.
“Small enterprises and self-employed are considered a bureaucratic problem by the government apparatus”.
And a civil servant present also voiced his complaint: “Why should someone in the civil service who is qualified for a position be discriminated against because of his scale whenever promotions are given?”
Several NGO representatives called for laws that would recognise them legally and for more funding from the government.
At one point, in his brief replies to every point raised, Gonzi kept admitting that he would like to spend more on residential roads and on funding charities, but the state of the public coffers was dictating the order of priorities.
It was also an occasion for Gonzi to react to racist sentiments and generic nonsense. One person told him he should send all illegal immigrants back to their countries as soon as they arrive, and remove welfare benefits for the unemployed.
“I’m sorry, welfare benefits should not be stopped… nor will we send back illegal immigrants when they arrive,” Gonzi curtly replied. “How can we treat immigrants like that when they may be the victims of human tragedies?”
Another one representing an NGO asked the prime minister to give him access to newspapers, a baffling request which awoke the other journalists in a state of drowsiness in the stifling heat.
Gonzi did take up most of the comments and expand on some of them.
“Why should a broken road sign remain broken?” he said. “Why should it take so long to fix road furniture that may be dangerous if left abandoned? We’ll be experimenting in the coming weeks with some new initiatives to take action of these kind of things.”
About wardens, the prime minister admitted that “this country does not like wardens”, and not even speed cameras.
“My son came grumbling because he got a ticket for overspeeding near the Regional Road tunnel,” Gonzi confessed. “I told him ‘sorry, you were overspeeding, you have to pay the penalty’. What would I say if God forbid he had an accident there? The truth is that he didn’t get another ticket since then. Let’s admit it we need to discipline ourselves a bit.”
The Prime Minister promised to follow up the points raised by the people. The question is how much his ministers will deliver. Some of them deserve to be neither seen nor heard, but unlike children, they have to be accountable.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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