An article published recently that quite impressed me described how we Maltese consider foreign workers in Malta and how we treat them: at best, we regard them as a pain in the neck, and when interacting with them we make it a point not to smile.

The lack of smiles serves to package the overall message. Although quite probably, the whole country would come to a standstill without the labour contribution of these workers, Maltese and Gozitans  believe they are a heavy burden which is crushing the kind of life we know and cherish. Not to say that we also consider that these foreigners are taking over... not to say stealing... the wealth and identity of the country.

A grim, unsmiling attitude displays most convincingly the manner by which someone is being rejected. For people who have left their family and friends far far away from where they're living and working hard for a wage that is not so attractive, this hard attitude of "popular" rejection could be the most demoralizing aspect of an emigrant's unavoidably difficult life.

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INFRASTRUCTURE AND ROADS

For many Maltese, the word infrastructure always meant roads (and perhaps as well government housing). As of today, that's how it still is. EU membership continued to confirm this view since EU investment funds for Malta always were earmarked most readily for arterial roads that connected the island from end to end. They were considered to easily satisfy European criteria set by the Union for the selection of projects.

Building bigger and better roads remained the most significant testimonial to a government's commitment to deliver goodies. Meanwhile, the possibility to issue works contracts on their basis remained too a major theme that did not need to be highlighted.

And today everyone delights to complain about how traffic has continued to expand greatly...

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TWIXT PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

During past decades, public-private partnerships to run non-commercial projects of public interest were consistently lauded to the skies. In many cases, the outcomes were not so pretty. That's what the Maltese experience shows, and not just lately with the Vitals/Steward case.

I am astonished for instance how apparently nobody remembers Smart City, which was sold by the then PN government as a project that would put Malta at the forefront of the technological world. On that occasion, no heroic journalist emerged to tell us what was going on under cover of a scintillating propaganda exercise. Similarly, nothing was heard over the years about the project to introduce technologically sophisticated meters for measuring consumption by households of water and electricity, without the need to send officials to read meter household by household.

Not just in Malta - frequently public-private partnerships ended up as a costly farce at the expense of citizens. Which doesn't mean that there were no successful projects, sometimes quite successful... but they were rather few. And to be sure, we learnt minimally from them.