"Plans, plans, plans, We're so sick of plans, we get plans all year long, first from 'him', then from you, is that all you blighters can do?" Now the General Workers' Union has chimed in and asked political parties to draw up a five year strategic plan when either of them is elected in March, April, May or June. Before that day dawns, revisit plans drawn up by the Labour Party and you will have some idea of how blissfully unsuccessful they were.
The civil service was too bloated, we were told in 1973, so Mintoff drew up a plan to cut it down drastically. Thus slimmed, customers would receive better and prompter service. By the end of that plan, the number of civil servants started to look as if multiple cloning had taken over. Unemployment, we were told by our intrepid planner, would be resolved. Unemployment rose at a staggering rate. By 1987 we had Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici slotting some 8,000 of the unemployed wherever they were not needed. Appropriate measures would be taken to bring down inflation. Inflation spiralled upwards. It reached nightmarish heights in the early Eighties. And so on and so forth.
In a world that is now a global village, the very idea of plans is simply preposterous. It always was. Employed in the context of a communist culture they were disastrous in the sense that mattered most, their effect on society and individuals. In the name of a plan, millions starved to death in Ukraine to take but one example. At the end of seemingly endless plans, the Soviet Union was a bankrupt superpower, corruption seeping through its every pore, countless enemies of the people victims of the system; forty million by the end of the saga (Roy Medvedev), sixty million (Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest), take your pick.
In today's global economy, take the price of oil. This yo-yoed between July 2006 and January 2008. Mid-July 2006 the commodity touched $78.40 a barrel. Mid-January 2007 it had dropped to $51.80 (causing consternation among OPEC countries!) and started to rise again soon after. Earlier this year it touched $100 a barrel (causing panic everywhere except in the oil-producing countries). What happens to a plan drawn up in, say, 2005, when it comes up against harsh realities like these? It goes awry. As did Mintoff's. His seven year thingy, of course, was created to fit into a political pattern in which the central motif was the removal of the leased British base in 1979.
Nothing makes more nonsense of economic planning than political beeswax. Example: Dom looking towards the Abels of Europe, as he saw fit to see the bankrupt eastern European communist countries, and away from the Cains, as he chose to describe the economically successful western European countries. Nothing made less economic sense than the attempt to solve unemployment by inflicting thousands of unemployed on government departments, or on parastatal companies that needed them like a hole in the head. But worst of all was the consistent failure of three successive Labour governments to create jobs when their plans confidently predicted that labour-intensive industries would come on stream. Their plans said so, didn't they?
It's the vision, stupid
What is required for a country to succeed is vision, one that drums up the fiscal and physical infrastructure to attract investment, which in turn creates wealth and jobs, which in turn increases employment and decreases unemployment benefits; a vision that seizes opportunities to transform the island from the wreckage of the Eighties into a member of the European Union; a vision to sweep away for all time the idea so loved by socialists of central planning, of a command economy, of government interference at every level; a vision to promote the liberalisation of the economy as an essential policy for growth, that brought into the island a can-do attitude across the financial sector and set about creating a modern and incredibly successful communications and IT society from scratch.
Where Alfred Sant and his echoes in the Labour party flinched at these visions because, they moaned, the time was not opportune, because this, because that, governments led by Eddie Fenech Adami and the current one by Lawrence Gonzi stared into the future and seized it with both hands. Of course there were mistakes. Only communist governments claim they never make these. Of course there was pain. Only those who fear to grow never feel this. Of course there have been complaints that not enough was done in this or that sector. Sectoral interest is a matter of priority and availability of funds. Of course there are warts that still need to be removed. Warts develop over time and some take longer, much longer than others to remove.
But what has been achieved far outweighs any failure and provides excellent reason to return Gonzi to Castille when the time comes.
Dr Sant's panacea for what he regards as failure is - a plan. 'Let me repeat', he repeated last Wednesday. 'In terms of what we do now that we have joined the euro zone, and in terms of what we do about the social transformations that need to be implemented (such as in education, health, pensions and the environment), a plan to mobilise the able and the willing must be set in motion so as to ensure that growth and change really happen.' Where has he been the past 10 years?
His belief in plans has been tried before. It led to economic stagnation, excessive controls and centralisation of power. Change based on a vision 'to mobilise the willing and the able' has already taken place even if he has not noticed. True, the Opposition chose for the most part to be unwilling and unable but change took place for all that. A new beginning? What new beginning?
Just once more...
...and I hope never to bring the subject up again.
It could be the case that the President of the Commission, the Commissioner of this and that, the prime ministers of half a dozen countries are, like this government, soft in the head, round the bend, basket cases all if they meant what they said about Malta's entry into the euro zone. None more of a basket case than Jean Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, who declared that Malta is out there in the front in all that is happening in the EU. It could be the case that alone in Europe, Sant is correct in his analysis of Malta-in-the-zone, our place in it a no-no at this point in time. Well, pigs fly, don't they?
Time for more of them
When the Fenech Adami administration created the office of the Ombudsman and returned some power to the voice of the voiceless, I imagine it took a leaf or two out of Sweden's book on the system. Given the litigious character of our island race it was thought at the time that the office would sink without trace under the weight of complaints. As a matter of fact, the voice against oppressive measures by any segment of the public administration system worked. It did so in great part because the first appointee knew his onions and could smell administrative highhandedness from as far away as five kitchen working tops. His successor is equally at home in the appointment.
Statisticians can cough up the number of frivolous and serious complaints that have so far been addressed. They must be considerable. We now need to reflect on whether we should advance the system further, to ask why we are limited to one Ombudsman. It makes sense to have more than one.
The Swedish partiality for Ombudsmen goes back to 1809. Their task was, and remains, that of supervising compliance with laws and ordnances by judges, civil servants and military officers. Sweden initially kicked off with four parliamentary ombudsmen (we can well do with at least one to look after the ethics and conduct of parliamentarians, agencies the like of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, for example). By the end of the twentieth century it was clear that this was too limited, that there was a necessity to protect the rights and interests of a number of groups in society, for example the consumer.
A Consumer Ombudsman was established in 1971. He has an extensive portfolio of responsibilities. These include the protection of consumers and traders against misleading advertising and, after 1989 and1996 the observance of a Product Safety Act and an extended Marketing Act respectively. It is all very sophisticated.
Swedish under 18s have their own Ombudsman (we have a Commissioner, which is not quite the same thing) as do the disabled (we have a National Commission, which is not quite the same thing), as do gender and minority groups There is also a Press Ombudsman, but this particular office does not have as its basis the supervision of any legislation and is financed entirely by the Swedish Press Council, the National Press Club and the Newspaper Publishers' Association. Overall point is that an ombudsman is invested with authority and, except in the case of the Press Ombudsman, that authority has its basis in legislation.
As governance in Malta becomes more cultivated and highly-developed, this spread of ombudsmen will gain more relevance. It ought to be regarded as a requirement in a society jealous for the rights of the components that make it up and not as a luxury.
Last orders?
When was the last time you were stupid enough to say drinks on me and got stuck with a bill for Lm100 - er, 233 euros? Consider yourself lucky. Some time ago, at a London nightclub, a businessman told the staff that he wanted "drinks to (flow) all night". As the evening wore on and turned to night and dawn, his circle of friends grew explicably larger, the flow more urgent.
It started modestly enough, a £25 bottle of Pinot Grigio. By five in the morning when the call for last orders was made, £80,000 had been spent on champagne alone, of which one methuselah of Cristalcost £30,000. One for the road was provided by a bottle of vodka that had the cash register ringing at £1,400.
Add VAT to the final bill, £13,951.03, service charge, £10,382.74 and our businessman was asked to cough up £105,805.29, please. Enormous hangovers (there was not a bite of food shown on the bill) and disoriented livers for a day or two, and there they were, or there they weren't as they slithered out of the club at five o'clock on a summer's morning.
It takes guts, pun intended, to knock down all that stuff; guts, money and liver made out of steel.