Roamer's column

In an interview with this newspaper last Sunday it was put to Finance Minister Tonio Fenech that eliminating subsidies would pave the way to introduce more taxes. The opposite is true. When subsidies go, as it is intended they should in the case of Enemalta and as they have done in the case of our dockyard and in that of so many others, the government is left with more money than it would otherwise have, had it continued to pour money into loss-making enterprises.

Naturally the removal of the dockyard-scale subsidy to Enemalta as presented, somewhat clumsily, to the government's social partners for discussion, will hurt consumers of water and electricity something terrible. To my mind, nobody outside the remit of a home for the bewildered welcomed the impact the decision will have on their lives for all that it is correct in principle.

The task for this administration now is to protect those whose income is precarious by devising methods that will lessen the burden thrust upon them; but not only. It has to think long and hard about the impact that soaring tariffs will have on industry, to name but one sector, and whose collective scream of pain last week could, I understand, be heard in New York, which had pain enough of its own.

The days of cheap energy have long been gone. The immediate requirement is for the creation of some formula to anaesthetise, somewhat, the agony visited upon consumers brought face to face with a reality long swept under volumes of seriously, incorrectly priced energy consumption. As the party comes to an end, the government needs to re-think the way it switched off the music to allow party poopers to adjust to the arctic silence that is descending on all.

If I were the country's finance minister, I would lower company/corporation tax and reduce income tax - again. This will leave more money in people's pockets and help you, me and industry in its widest sense, to absorb less painfully the new energy costs and to be more productive.

Concurrently, there has to be a concerted effort by family households, commercial and industrial entities, including hotels and restaurants, to extract digits and invest in energy-saving devices. The government should lead by cutting back on excessive road-lighting systems by half. The new cost must encourage hoteliers to carry out elementary cost-cutting exercises - switch off 500 of the 1,000 bulbs that are switched on at six in the evening to show off façades, install sun-powered heating systems. Enterprise, commerce and households need to regulate the output of heaters and air-conditioners so that they can work in an environment one or two degrees lower than necessary. Many small things add up to a huge bill.

To brightly brighten us up

The finance minister has two electoral promises that probably keep him awake at night: bringing down income tax rate this year and the budget deficit to zero by 2010. It is likely that, given the current economic and financial climate, he will not achieve the latter and is nervous about the former. He is wrong to be nervous.

Like Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt, I believe that "the target of a budget surplus is paramount in our economic planning". I do not proceed from there to conclude - and it is this that has the government in thrall - that a budget surplus by 2010 needs to be written in stone. This can reasonably wait until 2011, 2012, if delay will cushion some of the effect of the proposed energy rates.

Any criticism of a failed promise can easily be weathered. The disturbing, international economic environment precludes makes it socially and politically more desirable that water and electricity rates are made less costly by leaving more money in people's pockets for them to pay their bills and even have some money left over for saving and spending.

In parallel with all this, Fenech must play Ebeneezer Scrooge to ministries and corporations asking for more money, cut down on their demands in a manner that takes the current situation into account and reformulate, radically, next year's spending spree.

Spend less; spend less; spend less... this imperative must be seared into his psyche. If we intend to build 'x' kilometres of road in 2009, build 'X' minus 6 and save millions of euros. Shrink other non-wealth and non-job-creating projects. Important only that he does not fool around with projects that contribute directly to the country's economic growth.

The finance minister must boldly dare - and as bravely hammer out an agreement with his social partners that takes into account their valid woe-is-us cries even as he dismisses others that fail to acknowledge the new realities of energy costing. Life on the financial trapeze is never easy, often perilous.

To honestly quote

Philosophers, like the rest of us, have many rights; like the remainder of us, but to a greater degree by virtue of their profession, there is one to which they have no right: fiddling with the truth. Kenneth Wain came close to exercising this right last Sunday in his contribution, Logic, common sense, divorce.

"So (Roamer's) grounds for denying the citizens of Malta the right to divorce", he wrote, "lie in a supposedly predictable future." Wrong. Wain notwithstanding, I made not the slightest attempt to establish any such grounds and remain baffled as to how he arrived at this conclusion. He would have been on safer ground had he kept these words to himself. Divorce was not even remotely the subject of my piece.

The Church's right and duty "to oppose secularism whenever this ideology opposes her beliefs" was; as was the idea that if a believer gives his opinion on embryonic stem cell research, this is seen as an attempt to impose his belief on others, whereas a non-believer's expression on the same subject is not; as was the scientific dogma that all humans come from embryonic humans; as was the statement that "the first test tube baby (proved) one thing categorically; here from conception (was) a separate being"; as also was the separateness of an embryo from its mother.

Divorce featured only in the referential sense that, 'campaigns for divorce, abortion and euthanasia abroad followed one another in that sequence', a sequence the bishops recognised (as indeed does the whole world) when, as he indecorously put it, they bundled the three together.

Nor was this his only example of what I am tempted to call mental legerdemain. The first sentence quoted above was preceded by this: "Concurrently, (Roamer) acknowledges that there is no lobby for abortion, never mind euthanasia". Wrong again. For one thing, the "never mind euthanasia" bit he sloppily attached there is his, not mine.

What I wrote was: "...nobody of any consequence in Malta has claimed the status (of a civil right for abortion) - yet. And, "We may assume it is a matter of time before there will be those who will agitate to make abortion a civil right in Malta, too, the progressive thing to do." As a matter of fact, the argument that what is inside a woman's womb during pregnancy is something a woman has a right to remove, if that is her choice, has already been made.

In parenthesis, Joseph Muscat, who lays claim to being a progressive, whatever that means, and whose only no-nonsense policy announcement since he became leader of the Labour party was a declared intention (without consulting the party) to get divorce on Malta's statute books, will have his liberal credentials closely questioned soon by those who decide to make abortion a civil rights issue. End of parenthesis.

So let's go back to where we nearly were and to Wain's ponderous, to my mind irrelevant assertion that the "demand for divorce has been around since the 16th century, for abortion and euthanasia since the 1960s - the two are not even close in time, not even casually related." This cannot be a serious argument and is not, because he adds, rather tellingly, "the clamour for abortion and euthanasia need not necessarily (my emphasis) follow on divorce".

No; but in the third quarter of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st, it has manifestly done so (fault-divorce gave way to no-fault divorce in the late 1960s and preceded abortion-in-special circumstances to abortion on demand by a mere fistful of years; so we've had 50, 60 million Macbeths from their mothers' wombs "untimely ripped" - in the name of progress, of the liberal idea gone gaga.

Why Wain chose to bring in the 16th century I have no idea, for the truth of the matter is that the demand for divorce has been around much longer, but I hesitate to throw Scriptures into the ring lest I am accused of "bringing in religion"; and that will never do.

"In logic", he went on, "Roamer's reasoning is called a non sequitur and is fallacious." Without for a moment conceding this point and, in logic, by misrepresenting what I wrote and implying I had said things I hadn't, Wain defied logic and seemed to have had some difficulty with the truth, something I am certain he never intended.