The government that speaks so much about the family, that says (and does, in good ways and perhaps in debatable ways, but that’s not the subject today) it wants to promote the family, shows a poor appreciation of thinking through what being pro-family means.

Let us leave aside all talk about forms of family, legality, and whatnot. A family is a unit of people related to each other, voluntarily living together (that presupposes some kind of relationship or love), generally pooling their resources and spending time together.

OK, that may not be the definition one finds in books, but maybe fits in with the concept of family we live out day after day.

This family unit, broadly understood, is and remains the basic unit of Maltese society, even though we have a high proportion of people living on their own who however most times tend to have some link with some family unit.

A government which aims for the better common good would understand that keeping the family unit as its weather vane is its high road. Many times, governments get sidetracked with issues like social security, education, justice, etc maybe because each of these pertains to a particular ministry so it is easy to get focused on that issue. Although many countries have a ministry for the family, keeping the family in focus goes beyond a single ministry’s remit and should be the broad direction of government policy.

Likewise, governments tend to get sidetracked into focusing on programmes and initiatives, laws that need to be changed and updated, or even the simple management of government-run programmes for this or that needy sector, but few stop to consider first the impact of government decisions on the families.

We have environmental impact assessments but we rarely have family impact assessments.

Seen from this perspective, the past years have been traumatic for families. Maybe, true, we started off from a level of taxation less than was being paid by other countries in Europe, but we seem to have made up for lost time. The climb has been quite steep, and came about completely unannounced. No government ever sat down with families to state the needs of the country were thus and that families needed to prepare for what was coming. For all the millions of words spent on the media, on papers, on television stations, in Parliament, no government has ever explained in simple terms how to combine the aspirations for a better future which underlay the EU referendum and the reality that the government’s expanding expenditure base needed to come from nowhere but the Maltese citizens, and ultimately from families.

On the one hand, there is an ever-increasing aspiration for a better standard of living, fuelled by consumer pressures to buy this and that, to get the latest version of everything, to enjoy life more than our fathers did, all based on a built-in obsolescence of most things.

On the other hand, wages and salaries were not increasing commensurately, certainly not in pace with the increased tax-take, nor even with the cost of an average family’s average consumption patterns.

For all the government’s sincere ritual bowing to the family principle, the past years have seen families coming increasingly under stress. There are still areas where more stress can be taken and absorbed, or otherwise Malta would not have the doubtful primacy of the least amount of women active in the labour market. Many family units saw an increase of people undertaking second or part-time jobs. Until, that is, the recession put an end to this important source of income.

But it was in the energy sector that the government forgot most its family-friendly policy. Over the past years, there have been huge public discussions (rather, diatribes) about rate increases but that was not the whole story. Not at all.

On a macro-economic level I have always held that electricity and water consumers must pay the full, unsubsidized, cost of the fuel used. But that never included consumers paying for Enemalta inefficiency. More about this soon.

Nor did anyone ever imagined the government through its newest agency, ARMS, would undermine families as it did this year. For long months, amid all the international crisis, and all the controversy about rate prices, people did not receive their bills. When the bills finally dropped through, they were of a dimension that would have crippled most families, even well-to-do ones.

That hump now seems over as bills are coming on a regular basis. But still the papers’ letter pages and online comments are still full about the lack of service provided by this new agency – how emails never get replied to, how phone numbers ring in vain, how it is still impossible to check online your account (as you can do on so many other webpages), how and where people can complain (compounded recently by closing down the office in Freedom Square – another Piano victim – and relocating it to far-off Luqa). And no one seems to have really understood why the meter–readers this time did not come with their usual machines which printed out the reading, but gave away a scribbled and unheaded scraps of paper.

That hump seems over, I said, but people are still smarting under the impact of the so-long delayed fuel bills as other bills are swept to the side until the fuel bill is paid.

But as we slowly emerge, bloodied and crippled, from this second tsunami, comes the third wave. The government, or Enemalta – one never knows which one – decided to structure the new generating plant which Malta urgently needs to replace the doomed Marsa power station, around the cheap Heavy Fuel Oil.

An article in today’s issue speaks clearly about the dangers of this basest of oil derivatives – “Heavy Oil is the highest boiling fraction of all the heavy distillates from petroleum and form about 5-8% of the original crude oil it is refined from.

“Operating a power grid dependent on heavy oil can be a technically difficult and hazardous undertaking. Under many regulatory circumstances in developed countries heavy oil fulfils the criteria that would see it classified as hazardous waste. Indeed the viscosity and contamination levels in heavy oil are so great that its use in society is essentially restricted to combustion for energy.”

It is true that the proposed power station extension will include various abatement measures – even though the combination of both parts of the proposed plant is a world first.

But the worst thing to emerge from the past days’ discussion was Minister Tonio Fenech’s alarming statement that for the plant to change over to a cleaner fuel would require the electricity bills to be 30% higher.

We’re back at the Mintoff stage when we did not have debt, but had little else. When we undertook 12 hours voyages on a small flimsy ship to Catania to buy toothpaste and chocolates.

For we are talking here about our health – and families get very concerned where health is involved. How can anyone trust the abatement measures will work with Enemalta’s track record of playing hard and fast with people’s health at the Marsa Power Station when the admittedly limited abatement measures were simply switched off for months on end and a rain of black dust settled on Fgura and surrounding areas?

Now that it is becoming rather clearer who was responsible for this decision, what’s stopping the Marsa and Fgura councils from class action against those responsible?

There are others who have made another argument: the money that Minister Fenech said Enemalta would save by using HFO rather than gasoil is not as huge as the minister made it to be, given the huge costs of plant maintenance in view of the viscosity of the tar-like HFO, and also in view of the cumbersome processes to export the waste product.

To get back to the family paradigm, a family would surely accept to pay that little bit extra and have its health safeguarded. That seems obvious on a micro-family unit basis. It does not seem so obvious on a national level.

Again, to get back to Mintoff and Malta’s 1980s, why on earth should we go for a fuel that even countries in Africa are phasing our and countries like East Timor and the Bermudas are protesting against when we thought we were entering the advanced and enlightened Europe?

Would a family accept a diktat from its head to accept something rock-bottom which pushes it back to a self-perception as a primitive, backward, family when all the aspirations fuelled by the past years have all been looking forward to a better future? Or would it be better to go back to one brand of everything, instead?

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