An American politician of Republican persuasion once remarked during a television interview: "Balancing the budget is like going to heaven. Everybody wants to do it, but nobody wants to do what you have to do to get there". Un peu facile, but the finance minister Dr Lawrence Gonzi and finance ministers everywhere, understand what Phil Gramm was getting at.
When the Opposition Leader rises to address the House tomorrow, he too will show us the way to his heaven even as he hurls anathema at Dr Gonzi's chosen path. Dr Sant quickly dismissed the Budget as an exercise detached from reality for all the world like an ophthalmologist diagnosing a retina that has lost contact with its surroundings.
Last Wednesday he startled even temperate readers of The Times by concentrating on such matters as credibility and truth. He employed a sentence that stated, rather alarmingly: "We had statements about how bad the oil price/supply situation had become, which stressed its impact on the government's finances", for all the world as if the oil price situation were not stressful. A price of $65-$70 for a barrel of oil was a self-evident loose cannon.
Unable to resist returning to a sore of his own making, the man went further: "Indeed, consider: on the one hand we have Prime Minister Gonzi telling us about his success in getting the economy to move again; on the other hand we have Finance Minister Gonzi telling us he is also controlling the government deficit. Then as PM and as Finance Minister, Dr Gonzi launches price rises for electricity and water that, no matter what apologists say, dwarf any increases announced during the last 30 years or so." How can an alternative prime minister write such sloppy stuff? Let's kill this one for all time.
Try simple arithmetic and do not bother to go back 30 years - eight or nine, when the price of oil was all of $12 a barrel will do. Then, Dr Sant hit on the bright idea of imposing what amounted to a poll tax of Lm48 on every household regardless of the household's means. The tax that was charged to millionaires was similarly charged to comparative paupers as a sign of solidarity and social justice with the needy.
Using the same method to deal with today's oil price, and if Dr Gonzi had wished to follow in Dr Sant's footsteps, the prime minister would have had to raise that tax to Lm260 to be in parallel with Dr Sant's manic solution for 1997 or 1998. The Leader of the Opposition really should keep mum about that episode which, along with his removal of VAT and the manner in which he chose to call Mr Mintoff's bluff in July 1998, led to the downfall of his government after only 22 months in office.
Priorities
I do not recall any Budget I have followed over two or three decades that encouraged so much natter between the government and social partners and anybody minded to submit his tuppeny worth before the document was finally clobbered together. The Opposition, which was also invited to contribute a share of its wisdom, declined, which was par for the course.
As far back as July a pre-Budget document was drawn up indicating which way the government wished to travel, what it wanted to take on board for the journey through 2006 all the way to 2010. As October drew near, newer, harsher realities poked their nose into the preparations, things like oil prices, which touched levels that were bound to place an obstacle in the budget's heavenly path.
Underlying the government's approach were three factors that everybody, but everybody, recognised as fundamental to the island's effort to gain a place in the economic sum. The first was doing a Jack and the Beanstalk to the deficit, a Lm150 million whopper when Dr Sant left office in 1998 but burgeoning anyway when the Nationalist Party was in charge before that. Staunching this haemorrhage, it was agreed, was a first priority. Everything followed from success in this area of fiscal governance. Dr Gonzi's budgetary programme for 2005 brought that deficit down to Lm76 million and he intends to shrink it still further during 2006 to Lm55 million and to less than 3 per cent of GDP in 2007.
This will be a remarkable achievement; even the massive increase in the price of oil, which affects everything we do - fuel keeps our industry working, our national airline flying, our hotels and restaurants functioning, the economy rolling - has not deterred Dr Gonzi from his central aim of getting our fiscal house in order. That alone is a creditable feature of Budget 2006. It is all very well for Dr Sant to repeat parrot-like his mantra that the budget had no vision. For the myopic this is incontrovertibly the case.
To Dr Sant's myopia we have to add Dr Harry Vassallo's, whose last contribution was an essay in shameless hysteria. The Prime Minister's (sic) speech made Dr Vassallo think of his university days when he was taught that "even the most determined liar is obliged to tell the truth to tell his lies"... "Labour doing its worst could never depress the economy so effectively". Dr Gonzi's admission on Bondi+ that "landlords have been crucified bearing the burden of the cost of social housing for six decades" was "not enough". Indeed, "it is cheap, too cheap" (this from a man who leads a party that has nothing to do and has not yet come up with its petition for a reform of the rent laws, a simple objective set more than a year ago and still an objective).
I don't know. There must be something to a Budget that is confidently seeing its way to 2007 (I have always maintained that 2006 will be this government's make or break year) and, pace Lino Spiteri, if not the New Jerusalem to its secular equivalent. And, Labour's worst nightmare, unless anything untoward happens during 2006 (like a pandemic) Budget 2007 will see tax bands adjusted in favour of the taxpayer, or the entire system of taxation overhauled, to leave more money in people's hands to save or invest, hopefully, rather than spend. This is the second of the three factors I mentioned earlier. Dr Gonzi's objective is to see through a plan that will steer the country successfully to 2010. Deus et populus volunt.
The third factor that Dr Gonzi has taken into account is the education sector on which this country's future wealth depends. At Lm108 million the sum set aside for improving the system of education and accelerating the process of creating a knowledge society (with an emphasis on science and a gamut of technologies) is impressive. What we need now is to see that it is spent wisely, that is, productively. We lag behind many of our European counterparts in science and technology. Government and the MUT must put in a very special effort if our students (our future workforce) are to compete successfully on Malta's economic and competitive behalf.
It is not so much the detail, although there is enough of that, as the sweep of this Budget that is impressive. It rises above the price of tuna and settles at a level that has a clear strategic line. But do not expect Dr Sant to notice this, tomorrow.
Vetoes - hard and soft
In Brussels, Malta has not yet obtained the high-level posts it is entitled to under its accession agreement to the EU. Dozens of well-qualified Maltese have applied to fill the vacant posts, which were advertised in many fields of specialisation. A year and a half after accession, it is hard to believe that not a single one of them could meet the high standards expected by the EU institutions.
A parallel development at the Council of Europe is both revealing and worrying. The chairmanship of the governing board of the Council of Europe's Bank (which used to be called the Social Fund) is vacant. Three meetings of the board between April and September, and seven rounds of voting, ended in a stalemate. Maltese Ambassador Joseph Licari, who is Malta's permanent representative to the Council of Europe, obtained the votes of 24 out of 36 voting member states, while the Turkish candidate carried a majority of shareholdings. Neither of the two candidates could obtain the required double majority (countries and shares). The bank's big shareholders (Italy, France, Spain and Germany) backed the Turkish candidate.
Fresh elections have been called for December 9 and there are now four candidates - a Swiss, a Dane, and a Cypriot, in addition to Ambassador Licari. Reliable reports now indicate that the 'big four' are ready to back the Danish candidate.
In the meantime, the embassies of these countries in Malta continue to make frequent and insistent representations to the Maltese foreign ministry to ask for Malta's vote for their candidacies in New York, Geneva, Brussels and elsewhere. It is hard to resist the conclusion that some big countries take Malta's support for granted and are unprepared to accept that, from time to time, Malta too deserves to occupy a post of responsibility in international organisations.
Which European artist did an English king knight?
Caravaggio? Unlikely. Carracci? No, but you are in the right artistic milieu for finding the man thus honoured. Think Rubens. He was born in 1577, baptised a Calvinist, switched to Roman Catholicism and married twice. His second marriage after the death of his first wife was to a girl of 16. He was then 53. Sir Peter Paul Rubens was, so the Oxford Dictionary of Art asserts, "the greatest and most influential figure in Baroque art in northern Europe". He will die three decades after Caravaggio, whose dark work he must have certainly come across when he was in Rome.
Many of you are familiar with Rubens' work not least because he was so productive and so many of his paintings are scattered in museums and galleries around the world. In between the creation of his prolific output of works of art the man found time to act, on occasion and successfully it turned out, as a diplomatic go-between between England and Spain, for which effort the English King Charles I knighted him. It did not prevent the regicide that ultimately carried the unfortunate Charles off to the next world.
For those of you who have some idea of who Rubens was and did, and for those of you who would like an introduction to this extraordinary painter, confirmation and revelation are at hand. The man had a penchant for painting naked women surprisingly unconcerned by the prominence of their buttocks, the girth of their waistlines, the size of their boobs and sensually sinuous for all that. His buxom Three Graces don't give a nod in the direction of Botticelli's hauntingly graceful, innocent figures; but for all their bulk there is a wholesome beauty about them. Chacun, as they say...
His sacred art rings true. In the higher level of his two-plane Crucifixion the dead Christ and the two thieves occupy what is clearly dramatic space set aside for the dead. Below, contrapuntally, a scene of intense activity is going on. It is only with his painting of the Deposition that calm returns. The horsemen and the soldiers have returned to barracks. The crowd has dispersed and the Christ is being brought down carefully, lovingly, from the Cross by his grieving friends.
We are indeed fortunate that Professor Mario Buhagiar, who heads the History of Art Programme at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta, has invited Dr David Jaffe, the senior curator at the National Gallery, London, to deliver two lectures on Rubens at the University of Malta - tomorrow and Tuesday between 3 and 5 p.m. at Gateway Hall A. The invitation marks the consolidation of a relationship created two or three years ago between Dr Keith Sciberras and the National Gallery and latterly by his participation in the February Caravaggio exhibition held last February at the National.
Dr Jaffe studied chemistry and conducted research on arthritis before giving both up to become the leading authority on the great 17th century Flemish painter. What strange chemistry was at work as he progressed from dry, complicated formulae to become a formidable authority on the Renaissance and Baroque and on Rubens whose catalogue of work, it is estimated, will run into 30 volumes? I cannot for the life of me answer that.
What I do know is that Dr Jaffe comes to Malta fresh from the National Gallery; well, as fresh as anybody can be if he is curating an exhibition that opened last month - Rubens - A Master in the Making and will remain open until the middle of next January. The exhibition concentrates on Rubens' early works. In the eternal quest for puns that delight sub-editors, the reviewer at The Sunday Times (UK), chose for his heading: And his world was made flesh.
This cultural event is, if I may use a dreadful cliché, yet another feather in the cap of the dynamic and stimulating History of Art Programme with its group of excellent lecturers and introduces the audience to a new experience of cross-cultural fertilisation. Art lovers must be grateful for that. Those who attend these lectures tomorrow and Tuesday, between 3 and 5 p.m. will discover the world of Rubens, or more likely a part of it: his early years.