The government has ‘magnanimously’ come up with a one-time offer to the families considered to be the most at risk in order to alleviate the hardships they are facing due to the increased price of oil and other items.

The Opposition has been making a lot of noise regarding the fact that, this time around, the offer – or may we say ‘compensation’ – is far less than that given last year and so will reach fewer people than it did last year.

Whatever. No sooner had this been announced, the end of the month announcement we have become accustomed to hearing from the Malta Resources Authority was issued and we learned that petrol, and other fuel prices, had gone up. Bang. Before you could blink, part of the compensation/offer provided by the government had gone up in smoke.

Now that is an issue that at most concerns only those who were about to get the compensation – and the Labour Party for partisan propaganda reasons.

But time and time again, overshadowing it all there still lies the €500 a week that the ministers gave themselves at the beginning of this legislature and kept hidden from public view for two years. This has become Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s toxic legacy to the country. It poisons everything around it, anything that has to do with the state of the economy, rising prices, government-induced costs – anything and everything.

And things are still in a rather quiet phase, since our economy is not doing so badly at all in this era of crises and recessions. But if ever the government has to seek ways of increasing its revenue – whether to improve the public sector deficit, if the euro continues to go belly-up, or for any other reason – this self-created rise will become a very toxic issue indeed. In the minds of most people, it already has.

Nobody seems to know what in heavens’ name inspired the government to perform this act of collective craziness but no amount of apologies from the prime minister will blunt its toxicity.

Readers of foreign papers this past week will have had an opportunity to absorb the long reportages in The Guardian from the streets of Greece. There, and in Cyprus, but for the grace of God, go we. This is a people where young families are being forced to go and live with their parents, or else sleep rough, where jobs are non-existent, where people who graduated from top universities such as Harvard are having to take up part-time jobs washing bottles, and much more besides.

Whatever the wider issue of what happens now to the euro and the eurozone, we are not so far away from crisis point, at least because of our membership of the single currency. It is true that our fundamentals are rather different, in that our national debt is with the Maltese people and not with foreign banks, but we also have two particular sticky issues, each of which can cause our deficit figures to tumble: the Air Malta issue and the pensions issue. If ever the government needs to have more funds at its disposal – and the recent spat on free health services was another reminder – the €500 a week increase will come up again.

The people will not forget it, and will not be allowed to forget it.

Some time back, ministers who had taken some other increase were forced by the prime minister to give it back. Even though the €500 a week increase predates this, it would be a prime minister bent on suicide who would even think of forcing his ministers to give even this rise back. And yet only this past week, Italy’s President Napolitano declined the salary increase that was due to him, in view of the precarious situation of the Italian economy and the even worse situation of so many Italians.

It would seem that our present government is sticking its collective neck in the sand and would prefer us all to just go to the beach and forget all about it. But the issue will not be buried, and nor should it be buried. It was an act of collective insanity, a Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” multiplied by as many ministers.

Whenever the government bows to prevailing public sentiment and gives out some sort of compensation, it will always be unfavourably compared to the €500 a week it gave itself. Whenever the price of anything is raised, the €500 issue will crop up again. If one did not have the strong impression that this had been done by the most senior officials in both government and in the public sector, one would think that it had been done by someone plotting to bring the government down – to make it stumble and ultimately collapse.

This issue is not over, nor will it ever be over. It will remain like an albatross around the government’s neck until such time as either the government (rather improbably) removes it, or else the people remove the government.