Sour grapes!

Why are the Malta Labour Party and the General Workers' Union catagorising our "citizens"? I thought class discrimination was an obsession of the past.

Is it possible that Alfred Sant and Tony Zarb cannot understand once and for all that if businesses fold unemployment will skyrocket. Workers need their employers as much as employers need their workers. Is that so hard to work out?

Dr Sant would have us believe that Budget 2005 is a bitter comedy that is "playing with the lives of Maltese families". Who's losing the plot, may I ask? May someone enlighten him and stop him from playing with the minds of the Maltese families!

We can all be petty some of the time but surely there are limits. A 17 per cent maximum surcharge has been imposed on water and electricity consumption. It is a flexible and temporary measure. It is not a permanent tax. And yet, both the MLP and the GWU repeatedly claim otherwise. Why are they so trivial!

The price of oil price is $50 per barrel! If Dr Sant were Prime Minister today what solution would he concoct to help the country overcome this bitter situation? Let Enemalta go bust? If he grasps the fact that Enemalta will lose Lm19 million next year does he think it can survive if it had to absorb that mega-loss? Would he rather load the government's coffers with the burden and subsidise the foundering Enemalta? What?

When Dr Sant was in control of this country with a stroke of a pen he had irreversibly raised electricity and water tariffs by 90 per cent, across the board I might add! So much so he was accused by a predecessor of his of having lost his "social" soul.

Statistics show that at the time the international price of oil had just plummeted to $12 per barrel from $21 per barrel and yet he chose to increase rates "forever" to four times as much as they stand today.

In 1998, when the Nationalist government was returned to power, rates were reduced to 19 per cent from the unspeakable 90 per cent. It stands to reason that once today's price of oil is four times as much as it was in 1997, Dr Sant would multiply the rates to some 360 per cent! Even I can be silly, see!

Labour boasts that it "successfully" adopted hedging agreements. If this were true why was the "citizen" swamped with such an astronomical increase when oil prices were at their lowest? Something somewhere went very sour didn't it? And how did the GWU come to the workers' aid then? What did Mr Zarb do? Zilch! Nothing!

And now to save the Maltese families, Dr Sant wants the government to "depreciate" the lira, commonly known as devaluation. And this was not a passing comment of his, neither was it a slip of his mind. He has called upon the government three times in Parliament to do so, he repeated it in an article of his and also proposed it during a press conference.

In the early 1990s when our lira was unavoidably devaluated to maintain its level with other currencies also being devaluated at the time, Dr Sant admonished that it was simply a "political measure driven by panic".

He had warned that "the cost of living would soar to high heavens, it would hit hard industry competitiveness, it would discourage foreign investment, it would gnaw at social benefits" etc. That is exactly what would happen if anyone had to take up Dr Sant's nonsensical suggestion.

Today, if in isolation, (as far as I know no European country is currently devaluating, depreciating, deflating, reducing the value of its money) we were to devaluate our lira by the suggested 10 per cent the price of our imports will escalate by 10 per cent, fuel included, crude or otherwise!

I am no authority on monetary matters and I am not presumptuous by nature. So I feel safe heeding and repeating the governor of the Central Bank's warning that a devaluation of the lira makes no economic sense as our economy will undoubtedly regress. But I guess Dr Sant knows best, doesn't he? Another bitter pill we all have to swallow!