The meeting that the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development will be holding next Wednesday is a very strange one.

For it will be discussing the water and electricity rates that have already become operational (as from 1 January).

Prior to their introduction there was a form of consultation, but that was with the regulatory authority, the Malta Resources Authority. At no point were the social partners, who are represented in the MCESD, ever consulted. They will be consulted, if that is the proper word, on Wednesday.

What can they do then? They can only state the obvious – that this is no consultation at all, that things are not done like this in democratic societies, and that the cumulative impact of the increased rates will have a deleterious effect on the population at large.

This year, the budget discussions have been kept separate from the rates discussion – but one is not sure now if this was an improvement. It is true that last year a huge confusion was engendered, lines got crossed and ill will was generated. Then the rates were put down again as from March, considering that the price of oil had dropped from $140 a barrel to $35.

This year, the pre-Budget preparations began earlier and much of what the social partners suggested seems to have been taken on board. But the decision on the rates (which strangely have the same timeframes, starting from 1 January as well) then overshadowed all that the budget tried to do.

On the plus side, the rates, we were told, have now been locked for a whole year. But the social partners are now claiming that the new rates, far from going back to October 2008 levels, as the Prime Minister has said, are actually higher, and in some cases quite higher.

It has been claimed that the rates are now the highest in the EU but this, at least as regards the first semester of 2009, has now been disproved by EU figures. Yet the same figures show that Maltese industry pays the highest rates in Europe and there has not been any official denial of that.

It is one thing to say that the consumer must pay for what he consumes, and that the price juggling of old where one fuel stream paid for the cheap prices of another fuel stream must end, as must the government practice of fixing the prices according to political convenience. But it is quite another thing to be led to accept any price that Enemalta sees fit to impose and the regulator sees fit to accept.

One accepts that the Eurostat figures show Maltese households paying slightly less than the EU-27 average prices, that Malta is a small market and that getting fuel to Malta requires transport with the loss of the economies of scale that benefit other countries.

But at the same time, far more transparency is expected as regards the mechanics of fuel purchases: who is the committee made up of? How did it decide? What levels of prices were being charged at that time? Of course, in such a volatile camp, prices could go up as well as down: after all, hedging is … hedging, making an educated bet.

An even more pertinent question regards Enemalta itself. Is the new price in any way compensating for Enemalta’s inefficiencies? For its decades-long lack of investment, strategic thinking, forward planning? Does not the fact that, while waiting for the interconnector from Sicily to Malta, the government saw fit to purchase a stop-gap power station, which, even though complying with EU standards, still works on a rather outmoded technology, with potentially damaging impacts on the environment, a proof of panic and straightened circumstances, given that the Marsa power station must be closed within a certain timeframe?

Enemalta and Malta in general have been quite late in turning to alternative energy. Any other Mediterranean city has far more solar heating systems on roofs than we can see here. We are now attempting to turn to wind-power but there are many questions left unresolved. Two days ago Gordon Brown unveiled a huge investment in wind farms but some of the objections that have been raised would seem to be applicable here as well. For there, as well as here, the wind farms will mostly be offshore, in deep water, where the technology is not all that ready (and where, as a UK paper said, a toolbox dropped down a shaft could close down that windmill from October to May).

Then there is a question regarding Enemalta’s management, or lack of. Let’s imagine that Enemalta is a private company in competition with others: would it then issue bills for some six months as it seems about to do after a hiatus lasting some months? Does anyone even imagine what this six-month bill will do to families’ budgets?

Obviously, this being a country of many Chinese boxes, the interlocutors of the social partners, come Wednesday, will not be able to answer many of these, and similar, points.

There is also an even wider picture: on the electricity side, there are not enough incentives to get people to invest in alternative energy systems such as photovoltaic systems and how people can get to sell the extra energy they generate back to the national grid, nor incentives to help people build energy-saving houses (it is no less than a national scandal that such a huge area as Mater Dei Hospital was not built with alternative energy systems on the roof and that the hugely expensive air-conditioning of such a huge space must undoubtedly cost more and more energy). Nor have we come to differentiating day consumption of energy from night-time consumption.

On the water side, we still rely heavily on electricity-guzzling reverse osmosis plants, while every man and his neighbour have boreholes, pumping up water for free from the water table, little realising that Malta’s natural water resources are being sucked dry. The mistakes of the past, from the drying up of the valley springs and systems to the non-utilisation of rainwater by homes, are not being corrected.

Then there is the drainage system as well: while much ado is made because we will soon have three waste-treating facilities to stop us from depositing our waste in the accommodating sea (although the one at Il-Prajjiet (Anchor Bay) faces huge problems probably due to surrounding farms, with deleterious impact on the water table), little is said about the very old and decrepit drainage infrastructure on which huge millions (plus huge disruption and digging up of roads) must be spent to clear up the blockages in the system. It costs money to treat waste, once we no longer let it go out to sea and pollute the whole sea that surrounds us.