JR is alive but not well

For all of us who spent their formative years in the shadow and influence of Dallas and Dynasty, the two most famous and avidly followed soaps ever to hit the international screens, life today must be very puzzling indeed. The credit crunch and its consequences have yet been barely envisaged. As the governments of the countries that are worst-hit launch package after package and devise scheme after scheme running into trillions of euros/dollars to keep their respective financial boats afloat in what must surely be the worst financial storm to hit the world since the Wall Street crash 80 years ago, our Maltese government comes up with new taxes and levies to further reduce our spending power and that will, sure as eggs are eggs, bring the economy to a grinding halt.

I may not think that Gordon Brown is the greatest of British Prime Ministers but he certainly knows what he is doing by reducing VAT to 15 per cent, which is the lowest the EU allows at the moment. Mr Brown believes that if people stop spending, the disastrous ripple effect will be colossal and irreversible. So, like Blake Carrington or JR Ewing, when faced with financial ruin one simply must put a brave face on it and ensure that this coming Christmas is one of the most lavish you or I have ever splashed out on. This positive "spend and get richer" keeps morale high and, more importantly, keeps people employed. Therefore, we can breathe a small sigh of relief that, after all the palaver over the proposed retroactive energy tariffs as dictated by Minister Austin Gatt, the Prime Minister has seen the light and has accepted the counterproposals of the unions and constituted bodies. So far so good.

Last week, it was announced that they'd be a new tax on sewage but we have heard nothing else since. With all due respect to accountants and economists, at a time like this, balancing a sheet in the black must go out of the window for what will anyone gain by annihilating the spending power of an entire nation while the government wallows in oceans of euros?

That is a very communist attitude not a socialist one. Even the most diehard of communist nations has thrown it out long ago. What remains to be done now is to reverse that grossly unfair escalating registration tax on cars that penalises people like me who have a small nine-year-old car that is perfectly maintained and does not belch out toxins in the hope that every five years I will be induced to buy a new one to keep the car industry going.

We have come a long way since the butterfly and rainbow budgets of the 1970s and 1980s, budgets that would have been hysterically funny if they were not so tragic. Budgets wherein orgasms were induced with the announcement of a three mil reduction in the price of tinned tuna!

This depression, as dictated by a Prime Minister with whom dialogue and compromise were utterly impossible, was followed by an explosion of prosperity; a massive swing of the pendulum that in the 1990s caused both harm and good in equal measure. Extremes are never healthy.

The 2000s have proved to be a turning point. Here we are floating about in a sea of extremes. It is either doldrums or storms. There seems to be no in between. No Mendelssohnian calm sea and prosperous voyage to navigate us serenely to an even and equitable prosperity but the most uncompromising of conditions. Because of this, slowly but surely, the outmoded idea that the opposition has to oppose everything the government proposes for the sake of it is being thrown out as we can see happening quite clearly in the US where President-Elect Barack Obama appears determined to narrow the ideological chasm between Democrat and Republican. Here in Malta we have Joseph Muscat attempting to do precisely the same thing both within his own party and with the PN.

Both parties are due for a thorough spring cleaning. The fissures in both of them have become chasms that are apparent to all. The clay feet of these two idols that have dominated Maltese politics for half a century are giving way. How can one please the environmentalists and the accountants at the same time? How can one be socially sensitive and keep the Central Bank solvent? How can one keep the big guns shooting and the man in the street happy? How can one re-consolidate a party with a three-way split? How can you keep both Brussels and Valletta happy?

Malta faces big problems and, personally, I would not like to be in Lawrence Gonzi's shoes for all the coals in Newcastle. But, then, he is Lawrence Gonzi, also known as Superman and I am merely KZT.

kzt@onvol.net