PN’s manifesto of 1971 had the abolishing of Income Tax as well as the one in 1976.

I quote from the 1976 text:

“This law (Income Tax) brought with it too much taxation, injustice and inquisition. Far this reason the Nationalist Party maintains that the law on Income Tax will be removed in the forthcoming legislature. The revenue lass will be substituted by other forms of income which will bring about the great development which the Nationalist Government has planned for the country’s economy ”

Mario Felice expressed a personal view at the time about removal of income tax – he was backed by the party itself. He was not the leader. Moreover one has to take into account the era we were speaking in and what he had in mind. Stimulation of the economy.

The 1976 election was lost on other factors. Blaming it on Mario Felice is simply disgusting. Mario was to the party what John Dalli is to PN today. An intellectual asset.

Amen to that.

I am not a Government employee and haven’t been so for yonks actually. But – you have a tendency to speak without knowing what actually went on. There were places where we did the work for others, yes, doing the jobs of people who abused. But there were departments/ jobs where we were needed, and how. For example for translating from English to Maltese and back again, when people were seen to at hospital by foreign doctors who knew not a word in Maltese, whole days on end. We were basically the only ones with a decent enough knowledge of English to know what these foreigners were saying, and to translate accurately. Or when we ran a 24-hour ECG shift between us with only two permanent workers on the job, spending nights alone running from ward to ward, taking one ECG after another (and sometimes having to sit for an exam come next morning).

I agree with Corinne. The dismantling of the BA/ BSc courses was a disaster and left many students with no place to go. Of course such degrees were unwisely thought “useless” and done away with. So like what went on in those days in all areas of life.

[Daphne – Yup, I was one of them: 14 O-levels, three A-levels and my only prospect was a six-year student-worker BEduc – YAWN! So I went to work instead.]

Aha! Haven’t you ever managed to convince your sister that we really did work, full time, no sitting around, for an extremely measly “wage”? If that wasn’t cheap labour, I don’t know what was.

[Daphne – I work in business, so I don’t think like a government employee. The bottom line to me is always the money, where it comes from, and whether it has been well spent. The fact that you were abused, taken advantage of and underpaid does not mean you earned your keep. It merely means that the taxpayer paid two people to do the same job, possibly even four people because you might have been doing the work of three state employees. You did the work for a pittance while the others who earned a full-time wage for that job skived off. In other words, you weren’t taken on because you were needed, but once you were taken on, you were taken advantage of. At least 8,000 people were taken onto the state pay-roll in the mid-1980s run-up to the 1987 election. They certainly didn’t need student workers, but it didn’t stop them abusing the student workers. My sister worked for a private company, and she was a sixth former not a university student.]

That might have been the case with students who were sponsored by private firms. Those who worked with the Government departments know differently, especially those who worked in hospital. Ask medical graduates (then students) a few years my senior who spent days washing the wards and the loos at hospital or worked on shifts (night and day) taking ECGs, and they’ll tell you something about non-jobs.

[Daphne – I sympathise – you have no idea how much. But read my comments to London Area/Sybil. The state hospital wasn’t waiting for student-workers to come along and do those jobs because it had nobody to do them. It did have people to do them. But when the student-workers came along, the poor suckers were given the nasty jobs, while those paid to do them on a regular basis had tea and went off to their jobs on the side. So the tax-payer was paying twice: the regular civil servant and the student-worker, for the same task. Student-workers were abused and taken advantage of, and so were those footing the bill.]

I can confirm it was Lm28 a MONTH, increased to Lm33 a MONTH , I know for sure because they went straight into installments for my car and I still have the receipts.

[Daphne – This is one person who will never cease to mystify me. You earned Lm28 a month and you bought a car? Oh, I forget – you’re the one who went on to have seven children. Spirtu santu….]

[Daphne – Please read my reply to London Area. The fact that some students worked hard does not mean that their contribution was necessary. What we had there was a situation in which the tax-payer paid the bill for the civil servant who was supposed to do that job, and then paid the bill for the student-worker who was made to do the job instead while the civil servant took endless cups of tea and clocked off at 10am. In business terms, what you had was a situation where the employer was paying two people – albeit severely underpaying one of them – to do the same one job, and using other people’s money to do it because this wasn’t a business but the state. So far from student-workers earning their education, they were actually a further unnecessary drain on the state coffers.]