Don’t we live in a truly amaz-ing country? Our government might be blessed with many attributes but it certainly lacks sensitivity, its timing skills need honing and it seems to have got its priorities in a complete muddle.
It has no qualms about spending €30 million on Dar Malta in Brussels and a projected €120 million on a project in Valletta to glorify our parliamentarians. Now our MPs’ honorarium will be increasing by 37 per cent from €19,000 to €26,000! To rub salt into the wound, this increase is also being backdated to March 2008 ensuring that all MPs will enjoy a windfall of about €20,000 as we head into the New Year.
All this is happening at a time when salaried persons in Malta have been given a cost-of-living increase of €1.16 weekly equivalent to less than one per cent of the current minimum wage! I find this remarkable insensitivity very difficult to stomach. While I do not wish to enter into the merits of what several of our MPs are worth to the taxpayer, I ask if it would have been more palpable to increase their salary by €1,500 per year for the next three years so that by the end of the exercise, the current honorarium would have increased by just under 25 per cent to €23,500.
I am not against the principle of a Minister or Parliamentary Secretary receiving a salary for ministerial duties in addition to the MP’s honorarium. One could compare the MP’s honorarium to the fee paid to a non-executive director in a private company. Those directors who also perform executive duties, as ministers do, are obviously paid an additional salary.
When assessing what our politicians earn, we must not forget that an MP’s pension is uncapped. Based on an honorarium of €26,000, the pension will now be in the region of €17,300 annually. The maximum two-thirds pension for us lesser mortals is €11,000. The current interest rate on government bonds is about four per cent so that the “value” of the extra pension paid to MPs is in the region of €150,000 – that is the sum a taxpayer would have to put aside to increase his pension to €17,000, equivalent to what is paid to an MP. Put another way, our MPs receive a golden handshake of €150,000 when they no longer remain in public service.
As to our priorities being in a total mess, I am horrified by a report in The Times (December 21) that children with special needs sometimes have to wait for more than a year for their first appointment with the government’s Child Development Assessment Unit. Rather than talking about a state-of-the-art hospital, the Prime Minister should intervene immediately to remedy this shameful situation. These children are the most defenceless members of our society. How can they be placed on a waiting list which is described as “excessive and unacceptable” by a government appointed task force? We are talking about 450 children yearly so until this matter is solved on a permanent basis, I call on Minister Joseph Cassar to ensure that, effective January 1, all children on the waiting list may opt to be assessed privately and the cost of this assessment will be refunded by the government. If each assessment costs €250 and 200 children are assessed, the cost to the taxpayer would be €50,000, equivalent to the pay rise of seven parliamentarians. I have little doubt where the Maltese taxpayer would rather spend their money.