I must say I am impressed by the fact that this year the government is going into the sessions for Budget 2006 in a clear frame of mind, clear, that is, about what needs to be done while headless chickens career all over the debating area making inane and contradictory suggestions as to how Malta can be saved.

Tucked 'neath the government's belt is the collective agreement reached with the public sector unions, six of them, for the years 2005-2010 (MAM's signature awaits further tinkling with the negotiations so far). Involving some 33,000 workers, the agreement is seeing to it that these enjoy better pay and working conditions - and the incremental cost of which will cost the taxpayer something like Lm8-Lm10million.

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi says the money will not be squandered but will translate itself into more efficiency. We must wait to see whether this will be the case, whether departments will shrug off the intemperance of a bloated workforce, whether service at the first point of call and throughout the system will make life easier for users who come up against forms of demented bureaucracy, whether public sector workers will put in a full day's work not merely by being at their job but actually carrying it out.

The finance/prime minister has also slain, in a manner of speaking, the water and electricity dragon. Speaking for the dragon, Dr Sant, whose manic decision with water and electricity during the 22-month period he was in power electrified the electorate when he imposed the equivalent of a Lm48 poll tax per meter per household, expressed himself "shocked". The oil price in his time touched all of $12 a barrel. And even then, he was intoning recently, he had foreseen what would be happening to the price of oil once we turned the millennium corner.

This was rich when you consider that he had not foreseen what was about to happen in 1998. But there one is.

Anybody out there who cannot understand why the price at the petrol pump has gone up, or why the surcharge on our water and electricity bills will go up from 17 per cent to 55 per cent (except for 13,000 families who will pay not a cent extra for their lighting and heating this year) can only be under the misguided impression that the price of a barrel of oil has reverted from $65-$70 to $12.

Personally I would have preferred a smaller surcharge (warming our homes in winter is not a luxury in the way that taking our cars out for a spin is. This will be even more the case if we are in for a bitter winter). The difference in revenue could have been made up by a smaller surcharge and a higher price at the petrol pump, which will encourage owners of more than a quarter of a million vehicles to make more economic use of their cars. If fewer cars are burning fuel, Enemalta does not have to purchase so much black gold, pollution will decrease, gridlock put off for another day. All that has to be for the better.

How do you deal with the surcharge? Not all that easy, but hand on heart, how much does each of us waste by leaving lights on, using too many electric heaters for too much of the time, ditto air conditioners, letting water run, taking long, hot baths instead of short, swift showers, excessive flushing? I hear grunts all over the island.

But tomorrow the finance minister who will open the Budget debate and close it some time in December as prime minister (Dr Gonzi's dual role provides the only example I can think of where the prime minister cannot sack his finance minister) will be dealing with a vaster theme than this: Malta's progress towards that 3 per cent of GDP deficit; Malta's improvement in the all-important employment sector, Malta's export performance, Malta's privatisation programme, the challenges, benefits and problems of low cost flights, Malta's place in the IT sun, Malta's education system and the upgrading of skills, the cost to Maltese taxpayers of health and welfare benefits and what the government has in mind to reform an unsustainable pensions system in the context of a smaller workforce and an older non-working population. It is on this wider canvas that Dr Gonzi will etch in the country's progress.

What about the rest of us?

I understand that legislation is being drawn up the better to protect workers against noise defined, curiously, as "any sound which is present at the place of work and includes sound energy of any frequency, whether or not capable of being perceived (sic) by the unaided human ear". The emphasis is mine. I cannot imagine a sound incapable of being heard by "the unaided human ear" being sound at all; quite unsound, if anything. I have no doubt that some technical explanation for the oxymoron probably does exist.

But what I really thought was how unfair that workers shrouded in, and by all manner of, health and safety regulations should be the centre-piece of legislation whereas you and I who are assailed at nearly every turn by execrable blares and blasts, booms and chimes for pretty well 365 days of the year do not get a look in from the Occupational Safety and Health Authority (OHSA). It is clear to anybody who is not at his place of work and travels anywhere in Malta that we are subjected to noise pollution of acid proportions.

We have the ubiquitous horn-blower who prefers to drive through a crossroads without stopping and signals his preference by two or three deft applications of the horn; we have the driver, both genders as is the case of our horn-blower, who decides against all odds that his horrendous musical taste must needs be blasted where'er he goes, in built up and unbuilt areas, down silent valleys and up hills surprised by the sound of music; we have some car-owners who reckon that an exhaust-pipe is an error in manufacture; we have the endless sound of traffic.

We have refuse collectors, much improved of late but still unable to restrain themselves from hollering instructions to the man behind the wheel; we have other same who make a jarring cacophony of a job that requires a skip to be removed - sometimes, as early as five o'clock in the morning when nobody has any business to distress those who are still two or three hours away from wakefulness; we have a construction industry (crane-diggers, 'chasers', the construction workers themselves) which also seems to think it can start work before dawn and end it after dusk (where are our local councils or, for that matter, the police? Passing the buck from one to another from what I can gather).

We have the odd moron who assumes that if he does not shout he is letting down his macho image; ditto many of the no longer fairer sex, of all ages, let me hasten to add, who no longer feel inhibited from using swear-words as foul as they can get and a chunk of blasphemy thrown in for bad measure - and at the top of their voice register, none of that muttered obscenity; throughout summer we have an excess of petards in terms of sound and quantity, that waken the dead if they could and come close to polishing off some of the living.

Without unduly labouring the point we have noise pollution meltdown in our streets, noise that is fearsomely audible, fulsomely capable of being heard by the unaided human ear unless that feature has reached an irreversible stage of decay. So why concentrate on the workers when we are all assailed by noise and when a number of them are contributing to it? Come on, OHSA. Be fair.

Now Iran

At a conference ominously called The World without Zionism the President of Iran publicly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". The BBC's first reaction was to ask some intellectual at Johns Hopkins University for his reactions. Sure enough, the man whose name escapes me said that you could interpret what Mr Ahmadinejad said in two ways. One was that he meant it; another interpretation was not to put too much store by the declaration. The man was not quite larking around, mind you, but... the fact remains that this not quite a lark stunned the world.

I need to add that the BBC did not trot out Johns Hopkins again that day. But the BBC's correspondent in Teheran marvellously thought it was the case that the President could have spoken the way he did to rally support for last Friday's solidarity rally with Palestine. If that were indeed the case, Palestine's chief negotiator was not unduly grateful.

The Arab world, including those countries that have recognised Israel, descended into some form of comatose silence. The Iranian President, as if to point out that the man from Johns Hopkins had missed the point, repeated his call for extermination.

In contrast to the Arab countries, Palestine's chief negotiator was quoted as saying: "Palestinians recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist and I reject (Mr Ahmadinejad's) comments. What we need to be talking about is adding the state of Palestine to the map and not wiping Israel from the map".

Not unnaturally, Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon called on the UN, whose secretary-general rebuked Iran for the comments (that must have put the fear of God in Teheran) to expel Iran. At the end of last Friday's rally a resolution was passed more or less framed in the words used by the President. It looks as if the new man is taking Iran back to 1979 - and there will be a few of our western liberals will no doubt be pleading his case even as they condemn his words.

Only one thing is certain in an uncertain Middle East where some countries are slowly coming face to face with such realities as the rudiments of western democracy, Israel will not stand idly by and wait for its elimination. The last 50 years have demonstrated this over and over again, not least its pre-emptive methodology.

Making it work

It is an interesting project. Will it take off, by which I really mean, will it be lucrative enough? Depending on getting one or two conditions right, there is no reason it should not be.

Heritage Malta and HSBC Cares for Malta's Heritage Fund have hit on a great but half idea: a hotel heritage sponsorship fund. Guests at selected hotels are going to be invited to contribute towards the upkeep of Heritage Malta museums and sites when they settle their bills. Shaun Wallis, HSBC's CEO, and Antoinette Caruana, Heritage Malta CEO, explained the scheme at the launch last Tuesday.

It is all pretty straightforward, but the whole affair will be a bit of a no-no unless the public relations aspect is just right. Inviting guests to cough up a little something or, for that matter a big something, can only work if there is a three-pronged approach to the campaign.

First, space must be made over by the hotels for a professional photographic exhibition, or montage, of the selected sites (with an intelligent text to go with it). This does not need to be anything too grand, but it certainly has to be attractive and striking, part of a familiarisation process for guests to become aware and impressed by the heritage to which they are being asked to subscribe.

Second, the hotels selected should actually lay on visits to the places with guides to help their guests. Unless something along these lines is done I cannot see holidaymakers accepting an invitation that adds to their expenses. Sweetly asking for a donation is simply not enough and, I dare say, a trifle cheeky. It must be made worth their while to give.

Here is the other half of the idea. Rather than having a situation where hotels act purely as piggy banks into which their guests' money pours in, they can make their own contribution by matching the heritage funds eased out of our visitors. And within that half idea leave space for this. HSBC can match visitors and hotels lira for lira all the way, adding to the Lm60,000 the bank has already passed on to Heritage Malta.

Mr Wallis also intends to raise funds for the Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta by touching its clients in all HSBC branches. No doubt this will be skilfully done. Can I suggest a similar exhibition scheme in these branches? Perhaps the latter will be made to compete with one another in their fund-raising by allocating geographical groups: say the Safi-Tarxien-Qrendi-Gudja branches to take on the temples, Valletta-Floriana to look after the National Museum of Archaeology, the Three Cities the Inquisitor's Palace, Gozo branches the Gozo Citadel Museums and so on.

If Mr Wallis thinks I have done his idea proud, my account number is... but well done, anyway. The project is an act of leadership in an area that must by definition include us all. The government can no more fund the enormous expenditure required to safeguard and upgrade our heritage any more than we can on our own. Heritage is manifestly a public-private venture. We are all winners if acknowledge this and, more to the point, act on it.

We export and import more than one billion liri worth of goods and services. There must be a profit on each activity. Suppose, just suppose that private enterprise, including hotels and restaurants, hive off, say, 0.05 of their profits for reasons of charity, for matters of heritage, for sponsorships of the arts... No stampede, please.