Uphill drive

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Georgina Rossetti

The roads minister is facing an uphill drive, whichever way he looks. That is not limited to the standoff with the bus owners. That affair is one to remember, again and again. It will never end.

Subsidising from the public purse, through arrangements that have never been fully unravelled, a hugely costly and extensive bus replacement programme without truly securing it to a service level and stability commitment, simply fed a perennially voracious appetite for more, plus some dessert.

The easily predictable outcome has included monotonously regular confrontations. Ironically, as with all industrial action in the public sector, it is not the 'employer' - the government - that feels the pressure of and suffers from it. The citizenry suffers, particularly its less comfortable elements.

The bus service is not such that it has attracted car owners to give up, for the convenience it offers, the frustration of travelling at a snail's pace, if that, through increasing congestion. Most of those who use the service do so because they do not have a private car at their disposal.

Bus owners withdraw or restrict the service that they are subsidised to give to target users - not the government. The logic of industrial action in the private sector is to make the employer weigh the loss of any damage inflicted on it against the cost of meeting the demands of the employees. The affected employer, unless the firm is a monopoly, loses out to competitive suppliers for the duration of the industrial action, and until it recovers.

In the public sector, be it where the State is the employer, or where it enters into an arrangement with a private body to supply a public service, the logic is totally different. Industrial action takes aim at those members of the public who tend not to have alternative means to satisfy their requirements.

State hospitals are a particularly easy target. People go to a state hospital either because they cannot afford private health insurance, or because their medical need is such that it can only be catered for adequately in a state hospital.

Those who resort to industrial action in the state sector hit the entrapped, choice-less public. They do not do so deliberately to hurt individual citizens who are hit thereby. The intention is to rouse the public to push the government to reach an agreement with those who have an industrial dispute with it.

The bus owners have a dispute with the government. So, by the logic of public sector industrial relations, they went straight for the jugular - curtailing the public transport service to St Luke's Hospital.

To describe factually the brutal logic of industrial action in the public sector, in whichever area it takes place, is not to argue for a removal of the right of organised labour, defined to include the self-employed, like bus owners, to take action to press their claims. Nor can one ignore, though, the effects of freedom of action.

To be effective. freedom has to be exercised within recognised limits. The freedom to hurt the public, even harshly so, when one targets the health sector, should be deployed with caution. Otherwise, the result is the opposite of that intended by those who wield the weaponry allowed by freedom.

Public opinion will not necessarily be swayed to favour those who use their freedom to pressurise the government by targeting the citizenry. It could have a strong opposite effect. The government, on its part, cannot calculate that potential negative effect and antipathy up to the point where those who are taking industrial action will give up.

That is why industrial relations include some agreed constraints to freedom of industrial action, by any side, and provide for mechanisms to be triggered before the ultimate weaponry of industrial action is deployed.

It is not at all clear that, while taxpayers' millions were poured into public transport, such safeguard mechanisms were put in place alongside seriously drawn up and rigorously implemented service agreements.

The roads minister has the uphill task of navigating that bumpy road. It should not be so bumpy. His predecessors - the whole Cabinet - should have put in place a more thorough relations infrastructure when they went on with their decision to upgrade the private transport service at massive public cost.

If that is acknowledged it might be possible to benefit from the latest confrontation by negotiating to redraw the arrangements through which public transport is supposed to operate effectively with public subsidies that are never deemed to be enough by those who receive them.

The roads minister is also driving uphill with the programme to upgrade the roads network with the help of Italian funding under the Fifth Protocol. A carefully orchestrated public relations campaign is massaging public opinion with the insistent message that by the end of September the project will be completed.

There are discernible signs that the prospect is achievable. Stretches of road have been completed. Sadly for the belaboured minister, the planning inadequacy to which he was led to admit continues to inflict hardship on road users.

Road works are bound to cause disruption, particularly when they are as extensive as those under way along various main arteries. Badly planned management of such disruption makes the inescapable frustration deeper and longer. It is worse than futile to spin the message that long stretches have been completed and are 'open', when they are in reality still practically locked in at their ends. An abiding example is the Ta' Srina Road outside Zebbug.

The reconstructed roads should be open within four weeks, but not quite yet. Meanwhile, the minister gets the flak. The way he tries to field it does not help his predicament at all.

He put up a stout case in this newspaper a week ago to reply to those who claim that the acceleration of the roads programme was spurred by the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting due in November. He detailed how the programme had been planned years ago. True enough. Just as true is a complaint that the minister smoothly ignored.

It is that the Fifth Protocol project concentrates on the roads that are being reconstructed, but ignores completely the state of offshoot or access roads. The reply to that fact, one imagines, is that such works fall under different financing. That reply, were it to be honestly given, would still point the minister uphill yet again.

Why, one would ask, was there no proper co-ordination with parallel programmes, involving also local councils where feasible, and as necessary? That is another example of poor management.

The steepness of the road towards a better network should not be aggravated further by the habit to turn his back on much of what is unpalatable, or to attempt to play around with words. The roads minister felt it necessary to proclaim that it was wrong to say that roads were being relaid. He claims that the extent of the upgrading is such as to justify his claim to being in charge of 'new' roads.

'New roads' is a term that means laying a road where none existed. Roads are being reconstructed, with much more care for services laid in or alongside them than hitherto. Ego boosting need not grasp at silly claims to inventing the wheel.

The minister also chooses not to follow the line set by more senior members of the Cabinet, past and present. They admit that in the past our ability to construct good roads was not well developed. The present minister prefers to politicise the issue with snide derogatory references to the road-building ability shown by Labour governments.

Both when Labour was in office, and certainly with hindsight, there was much to criticise. Eighteen only-briefly-interrupted years of Nationalist government, and around Lm100 million of expenditure later, have not quite put things in order. New roads constructed over that span, such as the Qormi-Mriehel bypass, are already suggesting that, though the ability to build roads had improved, it was by no means refined.

The cock-up of the San Pawl tat-Targa-Naxxar project is another, much fresher example, not least through the aspects of the Naxxar junction, and of the lack of lighting.

Fact is that that the national ability to construct top quality roads is still an uphill task. The roads minister understandably tries to defend his patch and himself with fairly frequent incursions in the media. His persistence to ignore blatant shortcomings undermines his efforts.

He has tapped out not a single sentence to reply to criticism that road markings vanish soon after they are applied. That is already happening along the almost completed stretches of Fifth Protocol-reconstructed roads. The newness of the works brings into sharper contrast the shabbiness that is already developing, even before the roads are used extensively.

Soon enough, before formal inauguration of the roads covered by the Fifth Protocol takes place, road markings will be applied afresh. That will not only be ridiculous; it will confirm the waste that results from not adopting the correct technique required to make road markings last.

Ridicule is easy to smile away, and waste of public funds has become a way of life. There is a more serious aspect to disappearing road markings. They increase the danger of walking and driving along our roads.

It may not be long before there is legal testing of who should be liable for accidents caused or aggravated by shoddy public provision. That includes lighting and marking of roads. Ministerial responsibility could be redefined to mean more than accountability to the House of Representatives.

Does the road wind uphill all the way? It always does - both in the deep meaning of life and death, as examined by Christina Georgina Rossetti, as well as in political administration.

Ministers who are glib and lackadaisical face an uphill task with credibility.

Ministers who take their office seriously are always trying to do new and better things. Thereby, their task is always uphill, and their journey takes the whole, long day of their time in office.

At the end of it, tired out though they might feel, theirs will be the satisfaction of knowing that they do not travel uphill in vain.