Fatal distraction

My water and electricity bill will be going up in future. That much is clear. By how much and when remains a mystery. To be quite honest, I could never make head or tail of the bill when it came through the letter box. If the amount seemed vaguely reasonable it was paid without murmur. When it seemed unusually high questions were asked and sometimes the answers were satisfactory. The bill had to be paid anyway.

Nothing can focus our minds more than the prospect of being asked to pay twice or three times for the energy we consume when we know that we have no option but to pay up. We are completely at the mercy of the state-owned monopoly provider. Despite all the brouhaha about energy costs in the newspapers, few of us will ever make head or tail of our energy bills, how they are computed or what to do about them when something seems seriously wrong.

Even when one tries very hard to get at the facts regarding the cost of energy generation in Malta the results are very poor. The public is patronised and the matter is dealt with as though it were the exclusive precinct of a mysterious elite. Would it really be so hard to explain? Why is it that the government and its monopolies feel no obligation to be transparent?

What we are worried about is the impact on our budgets, a perfectly reasonable concern, but what we should be seriously worried about is in fact the way this whole subject has always been treated. The paying public is always the last to know and what it finally gets to know is little more than the bottom line in an otherwise unintelligible bill to be paid.

Speaking at the general council of the Nationalist Party and not at a press conference officially addressing the public in his official function, the Minister for Resources and Infrastructure, George Pullicino, was reported to have announced that a company among those who had registered an interest in the development of an offshore wind farm two years ago had estimated the cost of such a project at Is-Sikka l-Bajda at €130 million.

Almost completely out of the blue, alternative energy is now on the cards. Mr Pullicino also denied that he had ever excluded onshore wind energy projects. We must have misunderstood him badly for years and years.

Meanwhile, the ravages on economic stability, wrought by his colleague Minister Austin Gatt in announcing an explosion in the cost of energy, have been salved by Finance Minister Tonio Fenech announcing a revision of the original proposals in the light of the dip in oil prices. The Times leader attempted to explain it all as a ploy to psych us all up for a hike in our electricity bill.

The bewildering dance of the three ministers is thus placed in context, explained in terms of our established political tradition. This is normal. We should all be used to it by now. Did we not have sufficient preparation in the Mintoff years? I always found it amusing that we were scared stiff when both our legs were about to be amputated and then became a blubbering lump of gratitude when only one was cut off. It is a rather simple political device and one that works every time.

We make it work. We encourage our politicians to use it. It is not their fault when they treat us like sheep if we are always content to behave like a docile flock. We lay before them an irresistible temptation simply by not having the audacity to demand transparency, by submitting to a two-party structure that robs us of any possibility of holding any one-party government accountable.

The tariff crisis exposes our shame. All we care about is how much we will have to pay. Why we are to pay so much does not really interest us. Our family budgets are in a vice and we have no time to listen to accounts of the follies and of the deceptions of decades in the energy sector. We will eventually acclimatise to higher rates and go back to sleep.

The cost-to-me factor is a fatal distraction. Where is our national energy strategy? Who has even attempted to engage the population in energy-saving schemes? Why are we still nowhere on household energy generation when every roof can generate electricity? Why are countries with much poorer alternative energy potential miles ahead of us? Why do we have to wait for the government to approve or disapprove of this or that energy-generating system? The infinity of unanswered questions remind me of my electricity bill: a mystery with an unavoidable cost.

Dr Vassallo is a committee member of the European Green Party.

harry.vassallo@europeangreens.org