The government’s national strategies – on this, that and everything – just keep coming. How to judge them? The same way our beady eye sizes up new year’s resolutions. Never mind the grand intentions; look at the results.
If resolutions depend on willpower and intentions alone, by February they will be history. Those St Valentine’s chocolates will easily overcome willpower. The gym membership will already be unused. The stack of health food will sit on the shelves, hurtling towards its expiry date. The tracksuit turns out to be comfortable loungewear.
Our good intentions will lie buried in the collective grave where there also rest, in eternal peace, the resolutions of 2021 and previous years.
Psychologists explain why. Willpower is easily depleted. If you want a resolution to succeed, shift your focus from the grand goal to what you will do daily. Break the target into mini-goals.
Change your method of decision-making. Avoid having to take decisions (on diet, exercise and so on) on a daily basis. That only increases your risk of making exceptions, which will eventually become the rule.
Instead, build a routine. Focus on having a process, a daily system of little things you do no matter what.
You’ll need to make changes to your environment. Remove temptations from the cupboards. Leave your gym bag close to the outside door. Draw up a list of don’ts – things you will avoid – as well as a list of do’s.
Proclaim your resolutions to your friends. Help them track your weight or running time. They will help keep you accountable to yourself.
That’s it. If you want to keep track of your resolutions, focus on the results. Forget willpower and good intentions. Have a process, that can be measured daily, in a way that is transparent and accountable to your family and friends.
When it comes to delivering, government is no different. PowerPoint splendour and colourful brochures are to ministers what tracksuits are to the rest of us.
But if you want to reckon a minister’s chances of success, you need to look at the track record, not the tracksuit.
Does his or her ministry’s decision-making process inspire confidence? Does it have unbreakable rules of good governance? Does it fix what the National Audit Office says is broken? Does it keep its track record transparent?
Let’s see how those questions are answered in the case of how the Planning Authority has treated Tarxien’s scheduled Villa Barbaro and its gardens.
The 500-year-old villa used to have a protective buffer zone – trumpeted with much fanfare by the PA itself. The zone was declared just over a year ago. It amounted to saying that the height limits of nearby buildings were limited to four storeys.
If you want to reckon a minister’s chances of success, you need to look at the track record, not the tracksuit- Ranier Fsadni
Now, the PA has changed that decision, permitting nearby buildings to rise to six storeys. No reasons have been given.
Nothing has changed since last year – except the vociferousness of objections, filed by owners of nearby buildings who feel last year’s decisions hit their commercial interests.
Oh, in taking its decision, the PA has disagreed with the recommendations of its own Heritage Planning Unit and of the Superintendent of Cultural Heritage, which both advised the retention of the more restrictive buffer zone.
Here’s a classic case of long-term good intentions wilting away under niggling pressure. And that’s when we’re four years away from a general election.
Last year, the vote was unanimous. This year, the PA executive council took its decision in the absence of three out of its seven members. Even then, vote was still tied until unblocked by the chair’s casting vote.
A good system of decision-making is sabotaged. The cultural heritage authorities are ignored. And transparency is forgotten, with no reasons given for an astonishing change.
Just look at the results in this one case: ad hoc decision-making, wilting under the slightest pressure, with no transparency or accountability.
The Villa Barbaro case is not untypical. On the contrary, it’s a microcosm of what happens to a range of national strategies.
With respect to culture itself, the fate of Villa Barbaro is a more reliable indicator than the regional cultural strategy unveiled this month.
On finance, the minister in charge, Clyde Caruana, has lost credibility because of the number of times his appeal to safeguard the economic long-term has been ignored by his own ministry. It continues to underwrite huge waste, abusive direct orders and inflated salaries for the government’s cronies.
As for transparency and accountability, critical for the success of any ambitious resolution, the government has declared war on them.
The National Audit Office’s stern reports are ignored. The government is actively hostile to Freedom of Information requests.
It ignores its own authorities – the information commissioner and the appeals tribunal – when they rule in favour of journalists. It imposes near-crippling legal costs on media houses by appealing each FOI request – en masse – in the law courts.
Such resistance to transparency isn’t just a loss to media houses or the opposition. It’s a loss for everyone, including those who would like the government’s strategies – on health, transport, environment, and so on – to succeed.
Nothing can be managed if it’s not tracked. And no tracking matters if it’s not public and ministers cannot be held accountable for their results.
That’s why you don’t have to be jaded to be sceptical about the government’s best-intentioned resolutions for the rest of the decade.
It declares it will drastically cut our dependency on the private car over the next eight years. Really? How?
All the low-hanging fruit have already been picked. For any significant change to happen, the government will have to use a stick (say, parking charges). But this government has no track record of taking, and adhering to, unpopular decisions.
Let the government give us the numbers of its mini-goals for 2023 – the cars that will be off the road by the end of the year; the direct orders ministers may issue; its progress on human development… Let it commit to rules of good governance that the Audit Office insists on. Then let it commit to answer any FOI requests on those mini-goals.
That’s when we will know that the government is serious about delivering. Until then, all its PowerPoint strategies are no better than new year’s resolutions written in a bullet journal, with multi-coloured pens, by a couch potato in a tracksuit.