How like the Gonzi government!

First it comes up with the slogan “So that Malta grows in the EU” and uses it in the MEP election (which it lost), then it promptly forgot all about it and discarded it just as one would get rid of a pastizzi paperbag.

It then proceeded to go directly and diametrically opposite to what it had claimed to be doing. Instead of helping Malta to grow bigger in the EU, it is cutting off Malta ever more from the EU, thus reinforcing the natural isolationism of the Maltese nation.

Take just one example.

As anyone who has been abroad or lived abroad can say, one primary experience of living in Europe is the extreme facility with which one can travel around. Come Sunday, or Friday for that matter, one gets into the car and drives wherever the fancy takes him.

This was always the case in and around central Europe, but the removal of frontiers and border police and the opening up of Eastern Europe have created a myriad of venues for anybody with a car.

Obviously, this is by far easier for countries in central Europe and less so in the case of the deep south in Italy or Spain, mountainous Greece and of course the UK. In fact, if one were to correlate the Europeanness of any place with the distance from the rest of Europe one will probably find there is a direct inverse relation.

The problem with Malta is that being an island it had, on the plus side, a far more marked identity as separate and distinct than many other countries, but it has always been a problem to travel to and from Malta. Air travel looked like it could make things better.

But that’s speaking before successive years walloped the Maltese with huge travel charges and an invisible wall has been erected, which has so far kept out most of the low cost airlines.

The end result is that the Maltese have not only cut down on their travels abroad (a mark of Europeanness if they were to travel to Europe and also a signal of an improved standard of living), but are actually travelling less. Which accounts for the queues of cars that clog the roads leading to Golden Bay and Mellieha Bay and Cirkewwa, to queue for the Gozo ferry, every weekend. They have nowhere else to go.

Had the departure charges not been so unreasonable, for instance, far more Maltese would choose to fly anywhere, what with the cheap air tickets being offered, such as e9 to fly to Bologna and with new opportunities opening up.

The heavy departure charges are a disincentive not just for the Maltese but also for tourists, although ironically, it seems the tourists pay lower charges.

So the government, which boasted it wanted Malta to grow in the EU, is actually making it grow smaller. By choosing the taxation route in its bid to solve the financial problems of the country, it completely disregarded the well-being of the people and forgot that one way of feeling we are European is to feel affluent and at home in Europe. The Maltese have ended working much harder for lesser returns. They were starting to get used to the idea of having two holidays a year but an ever-watchful government pounced on this novelty and stamped it out of existence by taxing it so heavily as to make the taxes many times higher than the actual price of a ticket. And the government still asks, why are people so angry and resentful?!

It has also been reported that in a bid to boost travel to the Balearic Islands, the authorities in Spain not only do not charge the people who travel there or who live there astronomically high taxes, but on the contrary offer them air tickets at reduced prices precisely because the residents have the double disadvantage of living on an island.

Once again therefore, it seems that policy in Malta is decided by the Treasury not by the head of government, and instead of a government which notices positive developments and nurtures them through infancy to growth, we are at the mercy of a Treasury that stamps each positive development out of existence and which still thinks in the old Mintoff mode of “flus hergin barra mill-pajjiz”, just like we used to be told in the days when we had only one type of toothpaste and one type of chocolate.

The government is now boasting about the economy growing by 2.5 per cent last year and 3.1 per cent in the first quarter. Businesses report that 2005 was their best year in a row of years. And yet people struggle to make ends meet because of the electricity surcharge (it should be called subsidy, for that is what it is), and people who at this time of the year just love to go somewhere are forced to trudge the long road to Cirkewwa and back for lack of anything better to do.

Instead of feeling we have grown in Europe, we feel we have grown smaller in Europe, with less money in our pockets and with nothing to show for the hours we spend at work.