Last week, we observed from a distance, and with a certain complacency, Italy switching to a no smoking regime.

As we watched the debates, all the arguments sounded very familiar. “We have been here before,” we must have told ourselves.

Now Italy may not have been a good example, for basically its approach to the issue came very near to the one used here: the imposition approach, the top-down approach, the we-know-what-is-good-for-you approach.

Other countries that introduced the smoking ban did things differently. Basically, the real issue is that smoking harms both those who indulge and also those near them. But countries like Norway, for instance, also used the argument, completely forgotten here, that secondary or passive smoking does untold harm to the bartenders and waiters who, even if they do not smoke, imperil their health when customers smoke.

Norway again made it a point to inform visitors to the country about the new law, albeit humorously, whereas here there is no notice, let alone humour, to tell the incoming tourist until he faces some growling bartender, who should take a crash course in PR, ordering him out.

This is fast becoming the trade mark of this government: it somehow succeeds in turning even good things to bad.

Take the latest upheaval as regards plastic bags and eco-tax.

It is a proven fact that plastics are very difficult to destroy and that they resist degradation and decomposition. And that when they burn in the combustion of a waste fill, they unleash cancerous dioxins into the atmosphere.

So for a country, which for long years just sat back and allowed the accumulated rubbish to become a huge mountain, and which now intends to tackle waste management seriously, tackling the deluge of plastic bags was inevitable. If you consider the amount of plastic bags we somehow get through, some 52 million a year, or a bag per person every three days, and if you see the sea of plastic bags that have accumulated over just three months at the new waste management landfill (see page 4), it is inevitable that this issue had to be tackled. More so when you consider the amount of dioxins unleashed into the air at Maghtab, possibly measured (although the authorities never tell us because that would make thoroughly shocking news), and also the poisons which leak into the nearby sea, into the lungs of swimmers and into the fish, which we then eat.

In other words, once you start to tackle what was previously untackled, you run into problems and resistance. But why did the government have to complicate matters for itself the way it did?

In every other country where rationality rules, the plans are drawn up well in advance, made public in good time so that everyone has enough time to prepare, those consultations which have to be held are held and all interested parties are called in so that when the time for the change comes everyone knows what is happening and what is expected of him.

Now look at the way the plastic bags issue has been handled: although it had been vaguely mentioned in the past months that the eco-tax could be widened to include other products, nothing was ever made clear. It was only on 30 December that a legal notice was issued which stated that the eco tax had been widened to include, among other things, computer parts and plastic bags.

It is now being claimed that the government never consulted the producers of plastic bags nor employer organisations (for all that the government is attacked by the unions as being in the pocket of the employers!).

And, as an editorial in l-orizzont said last week, if plastic bags are such a health hazard, why did the government not ban them outright? (Although probably editorials would have come out screaming if government were to do anything so drastic). Does it not get people thinking, that editorial continued, that the only reason behind this eco tax is to collect more revenue?

We do not think so, but people are perfectly entitled to come to that conclusion seeing the inept way the whole issue has been handled.

As this paper had said in the post-Budget days, this government does not really take the people into consideration. It has adopted a top-down attitude in almost everything it does, and goes about ordering things “because this is good for you”. But more and more people are starting not to believe it, even when it is saying the truth.

For instance, one of the uses that people had for plastic bags, as we said earlier, was for putting the rubbish in and getting it out of the house. Now the government is tackling the problem from the end process, by creating an improved landfill and waste processing train, but it has shied away from tackling the problem from the household angle. Thus the government has come full circle: in 1995 Dr Stanley Zammit had tried to tackle it from the household angle by introducing a timid waste separation strategy without tackling the end process. This government is tackling the end process without tackling the household process.

We can see the result around us: being short of plastic bags, people are reverting to the dirty, inconvenient dustbins, with all the results we remember from a long time ago: lids flying, bins all over the street, etc. At the same time, the waste collector cooperatives are strapped for money and the system is near collapse. It is time to tackle waste collection in a planned and organised manner, to get households to reduce their waste, to separate their waste, to use the bring-in sites and the civic amenities, and possibly to refrain from putting out the rubbish on a daily basis, as we did when we used to go to the grocer on a daily basis.

Does it take so much for a government to stop acting like a fire-fighter, always on a crisis basis, and instead to come clean with well-prepared timetables and a reasoned approach?