“We have free education all the way up to tertiary level. Anyone who stays in education beyond the state-mandated age of 16 is paid a stipend. We have free medical care and a spanking new general hospital that beats private treatment and rivals the conditions in private hospitals.”
Many years ago I was in Paris and rang a woman I had known in Malta when she worked at the French embassy here. We went to a street music festival, walked around and stopped for a drink. An hour later, all walked out, I suggested we stop for another one. “I’d better not,” she said. “If I buy another drink I’ll mess up my budget and have to eat into my rent money.”
I was taken aback. I was far from rolling in it myself, what with three small children and bills pouring in from all directions. But you know how it is in Malta: when you’re out for a drink and somebody suggests a second round, and a third, perhaps even a fourth, nobody says “I’d better not. My rent money/loan repayment/electricity bill is due and I don’t want to mess up my budget.” Not when you’re past those early years of scrabbling around when everyone you know is in the same boat and admitting to it isn’t tantamount to public mortification.
I thought about this a couple of days ago, when the Finance Minister released the figures for amounts due to Enemalta (€200 million) and the number of households and businesses where the electricity supply had been cut off because bills had not been paid (2,438). The Water Services Corporation, he said, is owed €55.1 million.
Meanwhile, the director of Caritas Malta has called for a redefinition of poverty and an increase in the mandatory minimum wage. He said that utilities bills, medicines, gas and rent are pushing people into poverty. Monsignor Victor Grech sees poverty-related problems every day of his working life, but I cannot agree with him here. The present government cannot possibly be more socialist and left-wing in its approach to social services and the welfare state. Other Nationalist governments since 1987 have been even more extreme – more socialist than the socialists, who in our experience of them between 1971 and 1987 proved to be anything but, their solution being to bring down the rich rather than to better the lot of the poor.
We have free education all the way up to tertiary level. Anyone who stays in education beyond the state-mandated age of 16 is paid a stipend. We have free medical care and a spanking new general hospital that beats private treatment and rivals the conditions in private hospitals. There is no means testing. Those with chronic conditions get their medicines free. There are welfare payments for just about any reason under the sun that renders a person unable to work and support himself, herself and dependent children – a system so lax that it is abused and subject to countless cases of fraud. There are so many jobs going at the level where those subject to poverty are most likely to seek work that employers are resorting to refugee workers to fill them – the poor Maltese are just not interested.
What more do people want? Those who get the most in terms of welfare payments, free schooling, medical care and the rest are the very ones who contribute nothing towards the system at all, because they fall below the tax threshold. If I can read the situation correctly, they want to be paid to live without working, without cutting down, and without making do. They’ll go about their daily business while those who work pay tax so that the rest can get a cheque through the post as a reward for not making an effort.
Nobody in the real world expects to run a car, heat a home, consume electricity, and feed and clothe a family of five off the pay-cheque of one man in a low-level job, however high the minimum wage might be. Nobody in the real world would even think of starting a family on the minimum wage, still less one minimum wage. Nobody in the real world would pop out two, three or four children as though contraception doesn’t exist and God will provide when the parents can’t, when they cannot even afford to support one child.
And now here’s the big one. Women in the real world go to work and help pay the household bills. They do not live in a parallel universe called Malta, where the wife of a middle manager, still less the wife of a labourer on the minimum wage or just above it, expects to stay at home raising children – or worse still, not raising them because they’re in their teens - while taxes are creamed off others to pay for the electricity, water, rent, gas, medical care and children’s schooling that these women demand.
It’s the expectation and the sense of entitlement that shocks me. There’s no budgeting, then the electricity bill plops through the letterbox and oh-my-God we don’t have the money to pay it. My husband earns the minimum wage and we can’t get by? What do you mean, stop having babies? How dare you suggest that I get a job? You have a nerve to say that we shouldn’t have married and started a family on €250 a week. Why shouldn’t five people be able to live on €250 a week? The state should help us.
If you think this reasoning is fictitious, you’re wrong. This is exactly how people think. Some of them actually expect to raise a family of five in comfort on €150 a week. They’re already getting practically everything for free and still they want more. The solution – living off two wages or salaries instead of just one; not having children they can’t support financially; paying their rent and utilities bills before they even think of paying for anything else – just doesn’t seem to occur to them.
And while good hearts like Monsignor Victor Grech are genuinely concerned, they are concerned about entirely the wrong problem. That problem is the fact that Maltese people do not live in the real world. Accustomed to getting almost everything free, to electricity and water bills that don’t reflect the costs involved, to paying peanuts for rent as protected tenants, to a bubble in which women don’t work and men are the sole breadwinners, we have parted company with reality.
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