The results of The Malta Independent-commissioned survey of the public’s perception of the government, six months after the general election, will probably surprise the government itself, but hardly anybody else.

After all, we may have been made to consider the present government as the one that won the last election against all odds, but there is also the fact that this is more or less the same government that lost the 13,000-odd votes between the 2003 election and this one. Today’s survey shows, on one reading at least, that the decline has continued. It was only because of the ham-fisted way in which Labour fought the election, the super-human efforts by the Gonzi team, and even then it was touch and go till the very last minute, that power did not change hands.

One may, of course, prefer to see the silver linings – that at the beginning of any legislature the party in government takes some hard and strategic decisions many of which would not be popular, that one would have expected worse results and that the results themselves are not all that bad.

But they are. Apart from the 41.3 per cent non-committals, 27.7 per cent consider the government’s record to have been “bad”, and 12.7 per cent rate it as “very bad” compared to the 18 per cent who think it’s doing well and the 0.3 per cent who think it is doing “very well”.

Just to compare: Italy held its general elections some weeks after Malta and an IPR-Marketing survey was published last week, in the midst of the Alitalia crunch, and with the two main papers and the entire RAI stable agitating against premier Berlusconi. Forty-nine per cent said they more or less agreed with his stand and 45 per cent disagreed, the first time Berlusconi went under the 50 per cent mark, from a 54 per cent favourable rating the previous week for the government and 60 per cent for him personally. Whereas in Dr Gonzi’s case, he has now been overtaken by Joseph Muscat who was rated by a previous TMI survey as not being the best man to lead Labour.

What are the people telling the government? They are giving it quite a clear and serious warning, as we see it: the people’s concerns are not felt by the people to be the concerns of the government. The survey is crystal-clear: the major concern among the Maltese is their economic standard of living, battered by the surcharge, the cost of food items, the increase in the cost of living, and the levels of taxation.

Somehow the government is coming across as not really caring about those issues about which the Maltese care most. And, this is the real warning of the survey, come Budget Day the Maltese expect the government to deliver on its (rash) promises about lesser taxation, less car registration tax, less departure tax, and so on. And, above all, seeing that most Maltese (wrongly) perceive the surcharge as an optional and (more wrongly) as removable now that oil is less than $100 dollar a barrel, and considering that this survey was carried out before the latest electricity bills hit the letterboxes, they all expect to see the government performing the miracle of, as it promised, delivering a European standard and quality of living with the most gain and the least pain.

Consider meanwhile the next concerns: illegal immigration above anything else. Government inaction on this issue, whatever was agreed in Brussels last week, pushes the issue to the second concern after the economy, and pushes the same subject to the area in which 96 negative points out of a 100-point performance index were registered.

And the next subject: the environment, dirt in roads.

It is true there is widespread support for the government’s stand during the bus strike and appreciation of its efforts as regards education as well as, but somewhat less, on the Dockyards privatisation, but no one seems to have mentioned, for instance, Mepa reform, for all that this seems at every election to be about to unseat the government, and, for all the rivers of ink used up by the Opposition on JPO and preferences/favouritism, this is only remembered, with no prompting, by just 0.3 per cent of the total population, around the same percentage that says the government is doing very well.

To recap, what mostly seems to be going wrong is not that the government does not seem once again to be explaining its position well to the people (which, with such an army of Communications Officers and whatnot, seems well-nigh impossible) but rather a more basic trait: the government has still not put the concern of most citizens at the basis of its actions as each member of government seems eager to bang his own drum, and rush from place to place, but none seem to really, but really, care for how the people are struggling to survive.

Of course, balancing the budget is important, and keeping to international agreements, but so too, if we care to think about it, is keeping one’s word to the electorate. To put it differently, if we do not keep to our pre-established figures for deficit reduction, that’s no fault of the people but of a government which blithely allowed it to be pushed to all sorts of pre-electoral sweeteners in the form of lucrative collective agreements, and to employ people in all so many unnecessary areas. Time and again, an observer of the Maltese scene is astounded by the short-termism of politicians.

Even so, this does not really address the issue, except macro-economically, which is neither here nor there for most people. What has the government done regarding the cost of living except shrug helplessly and say that inflation comes from abroad – wrongly because a portion of inflation is homebred. Time and again we have said the way the surcharge has been left like an almost optional item was incorrect and the perception has been reinforced that it is easily removable, except by a cruel government. Time and again it has been pointed out that Malta, along with Germany, had the least real wage increase in Europe – and even that has not stopped the ECB from telling us we must remove our COLA-indexed wage increases and not a whimper from any official source.

Again, the survey does not really mention neither the government-induced costs on any household, nor the new wave of rigid enforcement at 360 degrees. To many, that seems the ultimate insult. To those who are bowed under the twin burdens of low wage and high costs, coming from those in air-conditioned offices and flunkeys all around, try telling them (as in truth it is) that ultimately what matters is increasing productivity all around and on a higher level. The worst tactic surely is, however, not to talk about the economy at all and to go on and on about non-essential matters.