Joseph, Marie Louise and the Fabled Money-Tap
He's found the money-tap.
This is my column in The Malta Independent today.
The Labour Party is just unreal. It talks about profligacy in public spending, but then bends over backwards to encourage the mentality of something for nothing, of ‘stenna l-bajtra taqa’ f’halqek’, of ‘iss hej, mhux fier’, and of making no effort at all to improve your own lot.
This is the opposite of liberal politics, but too many people think liberalism is about sex, religion and marriage. It isn’t.
And while Labour bangs on sarcastically about ‘money no problem’, this is exactly how it thinks and talks. The Labour Party has always spoken as though there is a secret money-tap somewhere in the prime minister’s office, and that if only it could gain control of that tap, it would change the country by splashing money about.
It has never made the link, in anything it says and does, between private initiative and money in the state coffers.
Nor has Labour ever made the link between private initiative and employment. Only last Sunday the Opposition leader told us that Labour will solve the pension problem by persuading more people, like middle-aged women, to work.
A Nationalist Party leader would have said ‘by creating jobs’ or ‘by engendering the right environment for job creation’. But Labour has always thought that you can whistle up jobs like you can whistle up money, so it’s just a matter of persuading more people to work.
When they finally decide that working might be a good idea, they’ll find the jobs ready there waiting for them.
The last Labour prime minister bar Sant put 8,000 people on the public sector payroll in the months leading up to the 1987 general election. Mintoff and his Golden Years adviser, the brilliant Karmenu Vella who – like one of those horror-film ghouls who springs up from the marsh eternally when you thought he was dead and over – will be writing the programme for our lives between 2013 and 2018 (a full 40 years after he was first a minister in Mintoff’s government), created schemes like the ‘Pijunieri’ and ‘Izra u Rabbi’ to falsely mop up soaring unemployment.
And of course, Joseph Muscat – possibly because he tends to be a little slow on the uptake unless thoroughly rehearsed beforehand – failed to make the connection between his factually correct statement that most women don’t work and his pet political accusation that most families can’t cope with the cost of living.
He’s either being disingenuous or it really hasn’t occurred to him that the one is the result of the other. Or maybe it’s just that he truly believes Malta should be the only place in the known world where one wage can keep two adults and three children, pay for the mortgage, furnish the home, pay the household overheads, clothe all five and pay for outings and trips abroad.
Oh, and also contribute the taxes and national insurance to keep those two adults in pensions and all five in hospital treatment and training or education whether they work or not.
The Opposition leader is correct in that more women need to be encouraged into the workforce (make sure of the jobs first), but he doesn’t need to wait until he becomes Boss Man to do that.
He can start right now, by using the excellent means at his disposal: Super One radio, Super One television, Maltastar, KullHadd, and the public platform given to him by the independent media which faithfully report his words without putting them into context. ‘Joseph Muscat said this’, ‘Joseph Muscat said that’.
“Women of Malta,” he could say into his Sunday Super One mike, “the only way to cope with the cost of living and to maintain your independence and self-respect is to work. If you don’t want to work, then don’t marry somebody who takes home €1,000 a month.
If you don’t want to work but still want to marry somebody who takes home €1,000 a month, don’t have children. But you can’t marry somebody who takes home €1,000 a month, refuse to work, have several children, and then complain about the cost of living and expect politicians to come up with a solution, because the solution lies with you.”
But he’s not going to say that, is he, because that’s the liberal approach and Labour is a national socialist party. Joseph Muscat will carry right on with his inherent contradictions, attacking the government because families are struggling to survive while failing to mention that they’re struggling to survive mainly because five or six people are living off a single wage, and that wouldn’t be ‘living’ in the way their parents, who slept on bales of straw in stables and ate only bread and onions, lived, either.
Meanwhile, he promises to ‘persuade’ women to work once he becomes prime minister. You know, because if he tries to persuade them now, they might ignore him.
They’re likely to ignore him in any case. Muscat knows that what his supporters want is not advice ‘biex nibghat il-mara tahdem’ but an announcement in the first Labour budget of a mandatory wage increase of 50% coupled with free water and electricity to go with the free schooling, free training, free university education and free healthcare – all while complaining about public debt, of course.
Perhaps we could also have free food while we’re at it: seize the importers’ businesses (now that we can no longer burn the flour mills) and have them run by the Labour Party at a loss, selling food at below cost price, or even better, giving it away to deserving housewives who are performing their moral duty of looking after children aged 19 and 20.
And as though to drive the point home that this is exactly how Labour and its supporters tend to think, out popped Marie Louise Coleiro yesterday, now fully recovered from her debilitating conviction that perhaps she had better resign from the Labour Party.
The Labour Party, she said, is pushing the government to lay on chemotherapy at the Gozo hospital, so that patients don’t have to make the terrible and arduous journey, across hill and dale and canyon and river, to the main general hospital several hundred miles away.
Well, that’s not actually what she said, but it’s exactly what it sounded like. A lifetime living in Malta tends not just to shrink the mind, I find, but also to completely warp our sense of space, proportion and distance. Maybe our Marie Louise thinks that ‘abroad’ chemotherapy services are laid on 20 minutes by car from every rural town and village.
The healthcare authorities have said that they looked into the feasibility of doing this, and found that it wasn’t feasible at all. It wasn’t an administrative decision, they said, but a ‘medical’ one, the advice having come from the professionals themselves. But let’s not kid ourselves, there are financial and administrative concerns, too.
Only the Labour Party would need to have this explained, or whine relentlessly on about public debt while demanding the full replication of chemotherapy services a few miles away from the existing ones so that patients don’t have to make the commute.
Many Maltese cancer patients have to make the far more trying and costly commute to London, so why doesn’t Mrs Coleiro Preca go the whole hog and demand the replication of the Royal Marsden at Mater Dei so that none of us will ever have to endure that?
Mrs Coleiro Preca piggy-backed on the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses, whose members are apparently feeling most resentful at the incursion of unwanted Libyan patients (more about this at a later date) and which has just released the most unpleasant statement that the government seems more concerned with Libyans than it does with cancer patients who live in Gozo.
The Libyan patients have made the arduous commute from their homes in Libya, but they don’t count because they are not Maltese. They are only human beings. Patients from Gozo, on the other hand, need to have their very different spatial sense pandered to.
Just listen to Marie Louise, who has done an excellent job of making all people who live in Gozo sound as spoiled, selfish and detached from the real world as eye surgeon Franco Mercieca.
“Because of the effects of chemotherapy, they are kept in hospital for a day and sometimes more, even up to two weeks,” she said. “But if the service were provided in Gozo, they would be able to recover at home.”
Get this: the problem is not that patients from Gozo are being made to commute between Malta and Gozo every day, or that they are being seen as outpatients, given the treatment and then turned out into the street while feeling ill. The problem is that they are given a bed but they want their own bed at home.
But there’s more. “Gozitan families also have to pay to sleep in Malta, or to travel back and forth to be close to their relatives.”
And the brilliant Labour solution to Gozitan families who don’t want to pay for the ferry trip or for a night in a cheap hotel? Why, that’s to make the entire country – including those very families who are resentful about paying the ferry fare – pay millions of euros for the duplication of chemotherapy services in Gozo.
Because all you have to do is turn on that fabled money-tap behind Lawrence Gonzi’s chair in Castille. Talk about irrational.
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Oh dear. You’ve done it now. “Labour is a national socialist party”.
OPINJONISTA NAZZJONALISTA SSEJJAH LILL-PL NAZISTA.
“the only way to cope with the cost of living and to maintain your independence and self-respect is to work.”
I very much feel the same way as what you wrote in this article.
However, the sentence which clinches the whole argument is the one above.
Women have to understand that the only way to gain their independence and self-respect is to work, not sponge off some man.
I would challenge Joseph Muscat to go to any litigation lawyer’s office and deal with clients (women) who have just separated or who are in the process of separation. I know what I am talking about.
He will see women who, at 45/50, find themselves without a husband and without a job, having been out of the labour force since their early 20s if they were in it at all. They are unemployed and unemployable, and face a life of abject poverty living off “relief” and still they steadfastly refuse to work.
Muscat will see, as I have done, that most of them do NOT want to work, even if their children are grown-up and independent, and even if they have the possibility to work.
Most of them want to keep living off the meagre maintenance paid to them by their estranged husbands, begging to buy clothing and make-up. Some of them even refuse to work just to spite their estranged husbands – little realizing that they are only spiting themselves.
Women who still live with their husband are just as bad. Many refuse to work because “qeghdin tajjeb”. But then they complain about bills, holidays being expensive and so on.
The problem is one of mentality – there are women who have been brought up exactly with the mentality of being a “maintained wife”.
This is what needs to be addressed from childhood and well into young adulthood.
I can assure Dr Muscat that no amount of coaxing will ever encourage a woman to go out to work if her life’s ambition was to be a stay-at-home married woman.
Joseph Muscat’s immaturity and naivite’ are, at best, worrying.
“Muscat knows that what his supporters want is … an announcement in the first Labour budget of a mandatory wage increase of 50% coupled with free water and electricity to go with the free schooling, free training, free university education and free healthcare…”
Nail on head.
Never before knew how to best summarise the attitude of a typical Labour voter, but reading elsewhere on your blog “sense of entitlement” truly sums it up.
Labour – a party for workers? No, people who want to work and appreciate having the right conditions that enable them to work, vote PN. Labour is a party for BUMS.
As if you ever made the link between fiat money and real wealth. Get off that horse and find yourself a mule. Your bewildering ignorance deserves it.
[Daphne – If I were bewildering ignorant, Kevin, I would have married one of the Ellul siblings, or gone to Brussels and dressed up as a cow after a lifetime of support for Dom Mintoff and – deep breath here – Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. I won’t say anything about becoming a policeman in the 1980s, because it would be an insult to some officers.]
If I would want to go far I would rather find a mule, but if I want to keep up apperances I would stay on a horse.
Googling again, Kevvy?
Off topic, but here’s a garbage article aimed directly at a previous post of yours: http://maltastar.com/pages/r1/ms10dart.asp?a=16597
[Daphne – I didn’t write about him. Clearly, Maltastar got a Champagne socialist friend of Labour to write that piece. Whoever it is, s/he should be taken on to sub or rewrite everything.]
The article wasn’t about Edward de Bono. It was a response to your Machiavelli article and neutrality (I can’t find it on your site). Read it closely. And Champagne socialist or not, the author is a complete moron.
[Daphne – I couldn’t be bothered. I saw a picture of Edward de Bono and assumed it was about him. If it was about Niccolo Machiavelli, they should have used a picture of him. Because they read me, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I read them.]
Joseph Muscat’s idea of progressive politics is to say the least anachronistic.
He’s stuck in the trap leftwingers fell into in the early 90s following the fall of the Berlin wall, promoting consumption financed by deficit spending at all costs as an instrument for social engineering.
What he doesn’t do is to analyse the unsustainable systems introduced by his colleagues in Spain and Greece and to a lesser degree Italy.
There’s also a major contradiction in his proposals when it comes to sustainability from an environmental point of view.
The whole saga about the power plant extension being a case in point.
Labour seem to have forgotten the infrastructure required for a gas storage plant, given the lack of a pipeline, which this administration is pursuing to overcome.
Russia’s capricious pattern of supply to the continent and Northern Africa’s past six months demonstrated clearly why one shouldn’t base decisions on declarations made with a microphone to a cheering crowd.
Marie Louise Coleiro’s comments and his jobs proposal underline their instinctive approach to matters of the economy. What they do is push aside reality to promote fictitious proposals, refusing to subscribe to problem solving.
It could be because two decades without the responsibility of government may have jaded their capabilities.
Excellent article. Loud and clear. Honestly, when I hear Labour speakers talking that way (like Coleiro Preca), it makes me perversely wish that Labour would win the election, just to see what they will do.
Not that I have the least faith that they can come up with a sensible solution. Far from it.
Min tafu, ssaqsix ghalih.
Well said, Ms Daphne. Keep up the good work. You are worth the PN en bloc.
Dear Daphne, I am so disappointed that these things are brought to light only thanks to your good self.
Allow me to give credence in this hour of need because the nation needs you as PN general secretary. You have the same qualities – ma thalliex dubbiena ghaddeja – as the ones of the past.
[Daphne – No, thank you. Each to his own and this is what I do best.]
It is well and good to assist injured Libyans. However the problems in our hospital which Maltese patients suffer, as the lack of beds and wards, should have been tackled first.
I should be charitable with my needy neighbour but it is wrong to be charitable with my neighbour and at the same time neglect my family.
Perhaps you should warn Libyans not to injure themselves until we’ve sorted out the bed problem.
Ian,
Regarding Edward Debono
http://www.think-differently.org/2007/08/guru-review-edward-de-bono/
Note points 1 and 2. Will we ever learn?
Should we starting calling it the “Nakita Syndrome” ?
Also reminds me of a 60s film with George C Scott:”The Flim-Flam Man”.
Why do women need to work when -according to Joey- every family will be blessed with the living wage once he is in power?
It is evident, Daphne dear, that your father found the money tap open from 1971 to 1987 installing lifts in both Malta and Libya.
[Daphne – H. Mizzi, my father’s company installed its first lift in 1962, when he was 24. By the end of the tourism building boom and the advent of the Labour government in 1971, it had installed many hundreds.
His company worked in Libya only under King Idris, never under Muammar Gaddafi, hence never after 1969.
His business was very badly hit after Dom Mintoff came to power in 1971, largely because the economy ground to a halt, but also because he (my father, that is, not Mintoff) was adamantly opposed to any form of bribery or corruption.
He was also singled out for special ill-treatment by the banks from 1974 onwards, because of his refusal to bribe anyone or take on a Labour ‘friend’ as a silent partner, but also because his father was president of the National Bank of Malta when Mintoff declared war on it and seized it, telling his ignorant supporters that he had set up Bank of Valletta rather than stolen it from its rightful owners.
Not content with this, the General Workers Union decided to perform a pincer movement with the banks, and (in those days you couldn’t make anybody redundant without the union’s permission) refused to allow him to make the necessary lay-offs.
Every week he had to find the money to pay a small army of men for whom there was no work but who couldn’t be laid off. I worked there at the time and sometimes I would forgo my own wages for three or four weeks so that somebody who had small children to support could get his.
So why didn’t they resign, you ask? There were no other jobs to be had – absolutely nothing, the country’s back was broken – and if you resign, as you know, you don’t get the dole.
The myth about my father’s company doing well under Labour – the absolute reverse is true – almost certainly has as its source one Ronnie Pellegrini, Lorry Sant thug extraordinaire. Back when Lorry Sant, as minister of public works, took on as a personal project the conversion of the Knights Hall into the Mediterranean Conference Centre, he couldn’t find a Labour bazuzlu to carry out the lift installation job to the required level and at the required speed. The only company which could do it was my father’s.
One day, while Lorry Sant was screaming and shouting at him and behaving towards him in that way that helped earned Sant a human rights violatiion record, they came to blows. My father flung the keys to his business at Sant and told him to go right ahead and take over, because he’d had enough and he was damned if he was going to be spoken to in that manner.
Sant returned the keys, a third person eventually calmed the situation down, the work went on, and the business struggled along until 1987, when the economy began to do so well that it recovered within two or three years.
Now go and put your head into a lavatory bowl, H. Mizzi, and flush hard – that is, if you are capable of doing two things at once.]
“Now go and put your head into a lavatory bowl, H. Mizzi, and flush hard – that is, if you are capable of doing two things at once.”
Hey, slow down, Daphne – I know Malta now treats its drainage before pumping it into the sea, but technology hasn’t reached that level of filtration yet.
I hope that H Mizzi will now disappear from the scene. We do not need any more reminders of the “Golden Years”.
Edward de Bono’s mother, who was English, was a keen supporter of Dom Mintoff.
His mother was half and half. Her mother was Maltese (Agius – pronounced Ayjus). No relation of that other Mintoff sycophant, Jean Agius, I hasten to add.
[Daphne – As in Marcus Agius, married to Katherine de Rothschild and chairman of Barclays Bank. Josephine Burns de Bono, writer of many letters to The Times of Malta, as I recall.]
What a good article and full of humour, too.I laughed a lot ..thanks.
I once watched Xarabank when a woman was complaining as she is an unmarried mother. You should watch her looking at everybody around her expecting to see tears in their eyes.
Anyway, she expected to be owed a living from the tax payer – she already had that but complained that it wasn’t enough. She MUST be a ” Joseph ” fan.