There's a hole in the bucket

Just when we thought that our lives would return to normal after such a long hiatus, our young, spanking new Finance Minister has, I am sure, much against his will, admitted that somewhere in the financial bucket, a hole has developed and that the deficit has risen to a rather iffy height! Can I really believe that Tonio Fenech, who has always been projected as our new financial whizzkid on the block, could have made such a mistake?

I harked back to my pre-election articles; one of the ones wherein I had declared that I was voting with a gun to my head and found this: "Not so the PN electoral promises. When a party has been in power for almost 20 years, give or take the1996 to 1998 blip, the promises it makes must surely be based on sound and sober knowledge of the financial and infrastructural limitations of its own previous legislature. Therefore, there is nothing much it can renege upon is there?"

Sound and sober my eye! Although neither Lawrence Gonzi nor Mr Fenech have actually said so in black and white, it was not the international fuel costs as translated into those cruel surcharges but an unforgivable miscalculation in what we are told are the children's allowances! The 10 per cent tax reduction that was undoubtedly the top pre-election pledge is now spiralling into Cloud Cuckooland! Never again will I take any too-good-to-be true pre-electoral promise seriously. If a government that was struggling to retain power could stoop as low as to hoodwink the electorate to that extent, can you imagine what a power-hungry opposition could do?

So, as Dr Gonzi and Mr Fenech sit in Castille merrily singing that awfully inane song, There's a hooooooooooole in the bucket, dear Lawrence, dear Lawrence etc etc, poor Malta and his wife (or husband) are left with an ever-rising monthly expenditure and ever-rising taxes to finance silly projects like the one proposed to dig up a bunker the size of which would put Adolf Hitler's to shame in St John Square with the consequence of ruining Valletta for years on end. Quod non fecerunt Nazi, fecerunt Nazzjonalisti!

Have I stopped kicking myself about what I wrote six months ago? Frankly, I have only just started as I actually believed that it would be illogical for a party to commit itself to so much without the wherewithal to do so. I had underestimated the power of spin and was, like the "relative majority", taken in by it all. What's more, and here lies the crunch, I could have bet my bottom euro cent that a government led by Alfred Sant would have been a far worse alternative, which is what was, I am convinced, the only really salient factor that awarded the PN with the March electoral victory.

With this latest bolt out of the blue regarding deficits and other post-electoral incubi all we can do is once again gird our loins or, rather, in the evergreen words of that prophet of doom, Dom Mintoff, tighten our belts. At least Mr Mintoff used to have the decency to warn us about it in advance, usually at Christmastime, at roughly the same time when Her Majesty, full of Christmas cheer, was, for the umpteenth time, referring to her "husband and I".

When the PN was elected in 1987 the seesaw reaction was a wave of prosperity, a feel-good tsunami that wafted us into such a state of complacency that the PN, despite it all, lost the election to what we were led to believe was New Labour less than a decade later!

Since then life has become more and more expensive, which is why the pre-electoral gimmick of 10 per cent being dangled like a juicy carrot now rankles so much as it recedes further and further away from reality... just like the raison d'etre for the election itself.

We are neither spoilt nor capricious. We are merely fed up of being taken for a ride. I have been told by PN apologists that it will take five years to implement the entire goody bag of PN promises which purport to turn Malta into Utopia and that the tax reduction would be kept for the end of the legislature like the proverbial raisin at the end of a blood sausage!

The consequences of the MLP's constant flow of blunders since 1998, a full decade, cannot be undone in one fell swoop no matter how good-intentioned Joseph Muscat is.

The state Malta is in is directly attributable to this. As Eddie Fenech Adami said way back in 1998, when re-elected, it was essential to have a strong and supportive opposition to serve democracy. Ten years later, that decent opposition is, considering the MLP's subsequent internal electoral enigmas, still a pie in the sky unless some miracle happens... We wait with bated breath!

Till then it's "Well mend it, dear Tonio, dear Tonio...!"

kzt@onvol.net