I wonder if there is any other country where it takes a senior Cabinet minister to introduce the new format of water and electricity bills. That is what happened when Minister Austin Gatt addressed a media conference to break the news and also go into the new bills format in detail.

I have to say I was not surprised. Everybody, as well as ants and other insects seeking warmth know the cost of our water and electricity services are high and rising. From January 1, they shot up back to October 2008 levels for household consumers, and to considerably more than that for economic operators.

The tariffs issue has been ongoing for several years, now. And it isn't just because the price of crude oil and its derivatives has gone on a sharp upswing with temporary dips along the way. That has caused enough of a problem, especially since our utility suppliers, essentially Enemalta, have seemed unable to get their purchases scheduled right hindered, one should add in fairness, by the relatively small size of our requirements in the big world beyond.

Hindered also, one has to repeat, by continuing inefficiencies at Enemalta. The absence so far of benchmarks against which to calculate the correctness or otherwise of our tariffs does not make for better understanding of the situation or appreciation of Enemalta's operational difficulties.

Beyond that, there is the fact that the government embarked on massive changes to improve the electricity supply starting from two decades ago, but failed to adjust tariffs early on to take into account the (depreciation) cost of the costly new investment in buildings, machinery and equipment. For years, there was no recovery at all of such costs. It was only comparatively recently that the authorities began trying to make up for lost time. To boot, they did that through mechanisms, like the much maligned energy surcharge, which its creators themselves later dismissed as making for inefficient allocation and, therefore, a grave mistake.

On top of all that Minister Austin Gatt was accused, and in a sense later on admitted so, that he had not handled the publicity side of the increase in tariffs, via the surcharge or directly, as well as he might have done.

The involvement of the minister in the launching of the new bill format is evidently one measure to ensure that the mishandling accusation is not repeated with justification. It also has another objective, this time declared upfront. It is to restructure the billing information in such a manner that consumers can see as clearly as possible how much they are consuming, and to do so in passing, and not months after they have utilised their water and electricity supplies.

Such immediate transparency will not reduce the tariffs as they stand, but it can make consumers more conscious of their costly utilisation, and so educate them into trying to do with utility consumption as economically as possible. Cynics may well dismiss that objective. I don't. I do expect the utility suppliers to be as efficient as possible in every possible manner, be it in purchasing fuel, or in the distribution of their output.

But I also expect consumers to be fully conscious of how much water and electricity they are using, and to consume as frugally as the need for comfort permits. This means the minister was right to take it upon himself to explain the new water and electricity billing format. The explanation should not stop there. It should be repeated with due frequency, though not by the minister himself, once he has already launched the process.

Educating consumers in the proper use of utilities so that they can be economical as well as efficient is essential.

Some consumers might huff and puff that they are expected to watch it. Yet that is exactly what they should. Having done that, they have still more right to demand efficiency and transparency from their utility suppliers.

All the more reason to do so since the tariffs problem is far from being a one-off affair. It will be with us for a very long time. The real cost of crude oil and derivatives from it, adjusted for the vagaries of the US dollar against the euro, will remain high. It may dip sharply again, but such decline will be reversed as the global economy gradually moves out of weak recovery into more robust growth.

The reality of high tariffs will remain with us even when we finally take measures to diversify how we meet our supplies. Sourcing sustainable supplies from wind and sun resources, for instance, could raise the comparative cost of the supplies we use. Linking into the continental grid will not make for cheaper supplies, especially since the infrastructural cost of doing so will have to feed directly into the relevant tariffs. These two approaches will improve sustainable supplies, but may not - probably will not - bring about cheaper tariffs.

This is why economic consumption will remain forever essential.