Many of our readers will probably empathise with the following:
“We pay our taxes. Yet we try and get things done without involving the State at all. We sent our children to private/church schools. When we are sick we go to our GP and if need be to a private clinic or hospital. We pay our electricity bills and all the other bills as soon as we get them.
“But when we very rarely need the State’s assistance we never seem to get it.”
Take any common event, say an accident. One asks: do people, taxpayers, citizens, receive a proper service from the police? From the wardens?
Does anybody check the state of mind or health of the driver, or the state of car involved in an accident, or is it just a matter of a measuring tape and rough designs on a piece of paper?
How can the community be protected from serial accident-prone people, especially those who drive trucks, buses that do not belong to them?
Take a burglary. After being robbed one calls the police, they come, look around, possibly dust for some fingerprints, and all is done in a desultory manner, or so it is perceived.
Take more serious crime: do people believe the police are proactive and on the mark, or is a crime solved only when someone gets his revenge by spilling the beans on somebody else?
Take getting any service from any government department. They may have quality charters hanging up on the wall, but the service one gets is still as bad as it always was, and the place is not much better, except in a few places anyway. One is always met by the inevitable receptionist (usually chatting away to colleagues) and waved away in some indeterminate direction. After which one has to ask directions from one door to the next as if begging for information, when it is one’s right. And, when one is paying for these people’s salaries and perks such as half-days in summer.
And one is comes up against blank walls, flat refusals, a high and mighty approach, a relic of the times when the civil servant was god and one went to him humbly, cap in hand.
Speaking of arrogance, try getting something as simple as information or an explanation from some doctors, surgeons and professors. Others, it is true, go out of their way to explain and to be available, but when one meets someone who is anything but that, the shock is even greater.
And what about the Law Courts – the confusion, the delays, the sheer inability to have cases heard on time after telling the world and its grandmother to be there at nine, and hope it will be over by one?
Politics in Malta revolves around elections and, just to get it all wrong, we have one every year. Yet nothing changes. Governments come and go, people are still told to pay their taxes, and the government keeps inventing ways to make people pay more taxes more promptly, such as through that iniquitous system known as wardens, which has been turned into a money making machine.
Yet nothing changes where change should be made. The government speaks about high sounding matters, like the IT revolution, the Lisbon Strategy, the Internet divide, while the level of government delivering at what it is supposed to deliver at basic level, fails time and again.
To think an alternative government will change matters, as any Opposition will tell you, is quickly put in context when one looks around at the people who supposedly will deliver better and one discovers they are out to get the top job, but they are just as slovenly as the ones there are now, if not worse.
Yet the people we are speaking about will continue to pay their taxes, to send their children to non-state schools, to choose private medicine knowing full well that heaven help you if you happen to need anything from any government, any government service or department.