The great appeasers
Appeasement is the name of the game.
The other day a 20-year-old girl applied for a job. She works in a supermarket in the south; she works 40 hours a week, and at her job there is hardly time for a pee or a break. She also works on shift and takes home just under €600 a month. She drives a car and she has one child. She is a single mother.
Now hold your horses before you say I've started to digress.
I do not particularly fancy Peter Davies, the Air Malta CEO. I have never had a coffee with the man, who earns 10 times more than the Maltese prime minister, and I never have even entertained the idea of sharing a lunch appointment with him.
Yet the revelation that the former administration, headed by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, negotiated a collective agreement with the Maltese pilots that dictated that Air Malta will and must pay €750 to each of the 110 pilots if a day of leave is cut is incredible. Simply unbelievable.
To have been prime minister and accepted such a collective agreement says more about business ignorance than anything else.
Now let me digress a little bit more: I know last week's Gonzi interview in MaltaToday portrayed the man as some kind of economic visionary who apparently knew how to get the finances of the country right, but really that is a whole load of imaginary hogwash.
Gonzi did not know a whit about economics, and my problem is not with Gonzi but rather with our brand of politicians, who appease lobby groups and simply bow to their threats.
Before the election, the pilots, together with so many other lobby groups, were allowed to run roughshod with their proposals.
Back to the girl who earns €600 a month and is expected to live an independent life. Well, our pilots, all 110 of them, will get €750 each for fuck all if a day of leave is cancelled. And this time I have chosen not to asterisk the expletive. Because no matter how eloquent non-expletive English can be, the F word says it all.
In other words, Air Malta, subsidised by our taxes, will have to fork out €82,500 every time one day of leave for one pilot is removed.
Probably this micro-detail did not quite reach Lawrence Gonzi. To tell you the truth I do not believe he ever looked at the micro or the macro.
What is more worrying is the fact that Joseph Muscat is very unlikely to take on the pilots and revisit their collective agreement.
Peter Davies is of course right to cry foul. Needless to say, the pilots will remind everyone that Mr Davies is on a half-million salary and not their 100K plus. And government officials will pour scorn on the decision to employ a foreigner. But in reality, the problem is that at the very end of the day Davies is right when he says that the airline pilots think Air Malta is their private flying club.
Before the pilots became the centre of attention, we had the politicians who thought Air Malta was their private fiefdom. In Mintoff's days it was Wistin Abela's bunch of troglodytes who ended up as loaders; then there was Fenech Adami's era and the Josef Bonnici ministerial period - he unsurprisingly promoted many of his cronies to jobs at Air Malta.
All the politicians red and blue who presided over Air Malta milked the airline like there was no tomorrow.
All I know is that this year is the first in 20 years that I have decided not to fly Air Malta. I do not feel obliged to fly Air Malta. I pay enough taxes to support this waning company, and the last thing I wish is to inject more money to pay for the pilots' salaries and Peter Davies's bloated remuneration.
If anyone wants to save Air Malta, they can do it with their own money, not mine.
***
Appeasement is the name of the game, until you read what the hunters' leader, Lino Farrugia, had to say about BirdLife. I know Lino, because he has been at the helm of the hunters' movement for as long as I can remember.
If he had any sense, he would have moved on and let someone younger and perhaps more sensible take over the federation.
But the truth is that you cannot get anymore sensible than Lino Farrugia.
The vast majority of Maltese hunters have the same bad habits: they will shoot at anything that flies and are law-breaking citizens. Perhaps Lino Farrugia is the only law-abiding hunter in Malta. We will take his word that when a protected bird flies over his hunting hide, he simply looks up and appreciates the beauty of nature.
The only thing he can say is that before hunters would shoot at everything, so why should they not do it today? Lino Farrugia does not have one leg to stand on.
The only line of thought that makes any sense is his movement's influence on the political parties.
In other words, their very effective message that if they do not get what they want, they will threaten the politicians with their vote or accuse everyone else of being an extremist.
I thought Joseph Muscat was open enough to appreciate the implications of hunting in 2013 or, more importantly, the role of his administration in promulgating nature protection. I was wrong.
It is too early in the day to see if Muscat will genuflect to the hunting lobby; my first impressions are that he will. It is surely a great disappointment from a prime minister who is just 40.
A great disappointment about someone who professes to be progressive. Perhaps he should remember what Winston Churchill said, not Tony Blair: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last".