With the Budget fast approaching, many organisations, including the ones I have the honour to be associated with (the National Association of Pensioners and the Alliance of Pensioner Organisations), have presented their ideas for inclusion in the Budget. Needless to say, each and every organisation strives to protect and safeguard its members’ interests.

In Malta, more often than not, public policy is formulated as a reaction to events and not on any well planned basis. Here, expediency and short-termism rule. Ephemeral visions are preferred to planning logically and in depth.

Nor is there any evidence that there is any assessment of the impact of decisions on society as a whole, or on sections thereof, before they are announced.

As an example, one can cite the recent announcement of very generous ad hoc pension arrangements for the judiciary. Here, the decision-makers appear to have taken into account only the needs and wishes of this particular class. They seem unfazed that thousands of pensioners are below the EU-accepted poverty line as their pensions are less than 60 per cent of the median income in Malta.

They also seem to have shrugged off the fact that the social security maximum pensionable income (which limits the amount of the highest pension) is hopelessly out of line with reality. This attitude is in direct contrast to the rather easy way the Government throws money around in other areas.

While certain cohorts of society seem to find it relatively easy to obtain increases in their salaries and in perks which extend to their families, while millions of euros are assigned with ease to projects that have no immediate value, while the huge cost of many so-called reforms in a number of areas turns out to be sheer waste of public money, pensioners are expected to make do with a COLA increase linked to the social wage. Pensions

above the minimum are practically frozen in time and based on salaries that have since doubled and tripled.

It seems that pensioners are seen as just an expendable burden, their contribution to society throughout their working lives forgotten and remembered only resentfully.