|
Choreographed to perfection, Lawrence Gonzi’s budget was a public relations masterpiece, but its effect has just about fizzled out, KARL SCHEMBRI writes
There were no heaters in the dungeon-like cellar at the Finance Ministry last Monday as the prime minister was preparing to make his annual ritual pilgrimage from Castille to Parliament, the budget case in hand.
It is usually cold in this humid basement when the non-privileged journalists and editors get their first copies of the budget (Net TV was broadcasting subtitles live as Gonzi read his speech) as they wait locked underground, mobile phones confiscated, a couple of hours before the televised budget speech.
Not this year. With the budget brought forward by almost a month, it is still like summer and electricity meters have still to start clocking the first massive wintry energy consumption. Which makes the timing, and the whole manoeuvring anything but a coincidence.
Whoever advised Gonzi on this one is a genius, the kind of strategists Fenech Adami used to have sitting on his chair sketching the plot of the latest political act.
Lawrence Gonzi’s delivery and political handling of the 2006 budget was impeccable. He shrewdly separated the water and electricity surcharge from the budget’s new measures, turning one of the most inflationary measures to be taken in decades into a budget with seemingly no hardships.
It turns out that Austin Gatt was an extremely useful decoy, shouting out loudly about the imminent 102 per cent electricity surcharge days before the budget, injecting forcefully the message about the skyrocketing oil prices that were about to be passed on to the consumer.
This was no message massage; it was a typical Nationalist blitzkrieg presenting the worst case scenario before deciding on a somewhat toned down version of what people would have been “prepared for”.
Not incidentally, the word ‘fuel’ was mentioned only twice by Gonzi on budget day, though ‘oil’ seeps through some paragraphs of his speech. ‘Surcharge’ not even once.
The way he did it, he only gave ‘compensation’ for the fuel surcharge on budget day. The 55 per cent increase on electricity and 3c9 extra on petrol came the week before. “Budget with no taxes” is a very catchy and irresistible slogan.
The two daily English newspapers were on Gonzi’s side, with The Times boasting privileged access, including world exclusive photos of the prime minister having a last look at the budget in his office, and a leader on budget day blaming the Opposition for eroding people’s confidence through its doom and gloom criticism – words that were coincidentally repeated by Gonzi in his own speech.
“A no thorns budget,” declared The Malta Independent.
Of course very few fell for it: in every bar, in every corner shop and on every vox pop, people were saying that the ‘real’ budget had come a week earlier.
Only three days after budget day, The Times sensed the full effect of the property sales tax measure, with a good help from real estate agent Frank Salt on his back page opinion.
“The implications of the final withholding tax on property is now sinking in, a few days after it was announced in the budget, as people realise it is not a reduction in capital gains tax but a tax based on the full selling price,” wrote Vanessa Macdonald in a front page story.
And there was the voluminous pensions reform report, thrown in with the budget for the least possible effect. According to the lucid evaluation of the president of the Pensioners’ Alliance, Albert Tabone, “the final report on pensions reform was proposing that people become automatically poor on reaching pensionable age”.
This is not to mention the myriad of factors that will be raising the cost of living further in the coming year: from staple food and services to ever increasing paid parking zones afflicting car owners.
As the first water and electricity bills with a 55 per cent surcharge start reaching our letterboxes, the people will find Gonzi’s slogan for this budget “so that you live better” not only in bad taste but downright deceitful. He will have contributed in diminishing the budget’s treatment by great part of the population as a national event, which is well and good, but he may also have a trust deficit which no amount of creative accounting will help him solve.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
|
