An exercise in delay?

Excessive Bureaucracy is frequently said to be a major cause of the problems facing our country. New government entities as separate from the civil service have been mushrooming. One could have thought that these organisations would help to bypass excessive bureaucracy or overcome delaying tactics. Alas, it is enough to look at just one example, namely MEPA.

This authority has dealt with most of the corruption accusations levelled against it and has achieved an outright abolition of a large number of environmental flaws previously associated with the construction industry. However it has also caused immense harm to the economy mainly through its delays in approving even minor improvements. This economic harm has resulted in the country not affording, for example, to maintain its education system. Is this bureaucracy being now applied even to our education system?

Was the report on State Higher Education Funding, better known as the Chalmers Report, really needed to reach such conclusions as that Malta's post-secondary and tertiary institutions are under "severe financial pressure" and that this was inevitably affecting the workers' morale? Or was this simply a tactic to justify the continued delay in properly financing the obvious needs of the University?

The report has also reaffirmed that we need to continue to invest in the percentage of 19-year-olds participating in our education. This percentage must be doubled if we still accept that our people are Malta's premier resource.

So was the Chalmers Report really necessary? The answer is definitely yes. Why? One major reason is that quite a few citizens felt that Malta is overspending in its ways of financing tertiary education. The report has clearly shown that the opposite is true. The University was very successful in using the finance it was afforded.

The numbers speak for themselves. The number of students has more than tripled and this was mainly achieved through the use of a carrot, the stipend, attached to tertiary education. It was also done with no apparent fall in standards and with a savings of 23 per cent per student even though expenses actually rose, such as VAT and cost of living wage increases. It seems that the University has peaked in its success and time has come to consolidate the structure.

The report reaffirms all the above but points out also, and this is a very important aspect of the report, that the system requires change. Unfortunately, as the Minister of Education has stated, the "stipends" question kept interfering with the major points in the discussion.

Probably it could be wise for the minister to declare a moratorium on the discussion on whether the stipend system requires change or not and decide that it will be retained, with perhaps minor modifications, for a definite period, say, three years. This reassurance would help us to concentrate on the real needs for change such as participating in the drafting of a new law on tertiary education. Otherwise we might be missing the wood for the trees.

The Chalmers Report is highly beneficial and we ought to be grateful to Roderick Chalmers and his team. It is a statement of facts that needed to be brought clearly to light. It also makes some valid interpretations. It however fails to examine very thoroughly the role of the University as an intellectual resource which is of great importance to a small island like ours. It fails to point out the needs of the country in Research and Development where our "human resources" should fit excellently.

It also fails, for example, to maintain the University's need to contribute more and more to MEPA, not only in providing biologists and environmentalists, but just as importantly in its organisation so that MEPA would stop causing economic harm while at the same time continuing with its good work.

Achieving this requires intelligence which is unfortunately lacking in MEPA and which could be provided by the University. And what applies to MEPA could certainly also apply to the National Laboratory, the Standards Authority, the Broadcasting Authority, the Medicines Regulatory Authority, the Communications Authority, the Mater Dei Hospital and many other structures that require a dose of "intelligent acumen" which a change in the University structure might provide.

One hopes that such a possible University's contribution to the nation will be given its due attention. The Public Policy Department at the University may perhaps give a kick start to these changes. The time is now ripe and the University and the government should not miss the boat.