So the government had to be dragged in, feet first, to do what it should have done ages ago – permit low cost airlines to come to Malta.

It is as if the backseat passengers rose in revolt and took over the driving.

Today, of course, everyone is in self-congratulatory mode and the pro-government media is already putting out a spin that it was thanks to this government that such a revolution came about when we all know this was not the case, that the government had to have a pistol pointed at its head for it to move – and then move only a bit, not enough, nor too soon.

This whole episode has opened up very worrying insights into what is blighting the government. At the same time, however, it has also shown government the way forward. More than seeing the light on the road to Damascus, it was more like getting a terrible bump on the head and seeing stars, but it worked. It may work again.

As Philip Fenech says in today’s issue, “The government was preaching competition but practising protectionism.”

It is amazing how wrong the government got it. It was using a completely outmoded economic model, based on protection, when the world outside had moved on to a model based on giving competition a free rein.

It seems that on one side there was the discussion that took place in the media, which was mainly one-sided and in favour of low-cost, while on the other there was a completely different discussion going on within government circles, where Air Malta seems to have exerted great pressure through reports such as those mentioned in It-Torca last Sunday.

This discussion, as according to what has filtered out enables one to perceive, was mainly on the lines that low cost airlines were seducers while the national airline was a virgin whose honour was at stake. It began and ended with what would happen to the national airline, the tour operators, and even tourism in Gozo.

But that’s only one side of the argument. The result has been to build up such a huge store of anger, recrimination and sheer frustration that the entry of the new low cost carriers will have the same explosive effect that the PN electoral win in 1987 had on the country’s economy: the same build-up will cause an explosion of outward spending, as Maltese families find that it costs just a little bit more to holiday in Tuscany than in Gozo. And that to go anywhere, you do not need to spend some Lm180 for a return trip, as Daphne Caruana Galizia says, but just Lm35.

And that, the biggest bulk of this is the unjustifiable exit tax, which is still Malta’s most hated tax along with the surcharge.

Only a relatively small breach has been made. Some make a case for a big bang, for more routes to be opened up, for a more sweeping introduction of low cost to anywhere. It may be prudent to wait some three, five months to see where all this is leading to. But there should not be any other delays beyond that.

Far from glorifying itself for inventing the wheel, this is a time for government repentance. The government must learn its lesson, even if this lesson costs it a bloody nose. There are still ample pockets of monopoly sticking around in our economy. Most of these pockets, from taxi drivers to bus drivers, from Enemalta to so many other areas, must be opened up, instead of being defended by a government committed to globalisation, competition and the free market.

This is what the people out here want from the government: most of us work in the open economy and do not have any walls to shield us from failure or competition. We just cannot understand the way a mind bred on protection works. Worse, we cannot stomach a government that uses our tax money to protect those inefficient enough to require protection. In the bad old days, we used to think the parasites were only the dockyard workers: now we are realising there are far more than dockyard workers, and that all defend their corner as if their lives depended on it.

The Malta that works, the Malta that tomorrow morning wakes up and goes to work, which works hard and many times in atrocious conditions, requires, demands that just as competition is a daily fact of life for it, so too it must be for the rest of the country. And that just as competition makes a man stronger, so too competition makes a country stronger, not weaker.