Today is probably part of a four-day weekend for many people, coming in between yesterday, the Santa Maria holiday and the weekend. I therefore doubted whether people would be in the mood for any serious reading and that is perfectly understandable. So I decided to keep this week’s contribution on a light vein but still providing food for thought on two issues.
Road repairs
The first relates to the state of our roads. A great deal of money is being invested in building new roads or widening existing ones and even resurfacing some of those which are in a bad condition. A significant amount of this investment is coming out of EU money. We need to remember that Malta had access to close to two billion euros of EU money over a 14-year period, which should close next year.
However, Malta still had to make its own contribution to this investment through the tax we pay. As I was driving on a particularly bumpy road recently, a thought occurred to me.
I could understand the building of the new roads and the widening of the existing ones.
They are meant to ensure better traffic flow and all projects have been subject to a cost-benefit analysis. As such this does not bother me in the least.
What bothered me was the existing roads which are in a bad condition, to put it euphemistically. My thinking is that these roads are in this state because of the heavy vehicles used by building contractors. The roads were never built to sustain such heavy loads of machinery, truckloads of building material waste, etc.
If we all played our part, the tourism product could be greatly enhanced and there would be more golden eggs in future
So now we need to spend the money collected from our taxes to repair these roads. And who will repair them? The very same people who were the cause of all the damage done to them – the building contractors. This is a very nice way of having the cake and eating it. Meanwhile, we all had to suffer the aggravation of too much construction, air pollution and closed roads – providing an economic gain to some but an economic loss to many.
Clean beaches
One statement that caught my attention this summer was that made by the president of the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association, warning us all not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
His thinking is that we should do nothing to harm the tourism sector as it makes a significant contribution to the Maltese economy, without which we would all be that much poorer. How right he is.
One aspect of the tourism product is our beaches. We do not have sandy beaches which are miles long like other countries in the Mediterranean. However, we do have a number of locations where tourists and Maltese alike can enjoy a swim. Some of these are not the usual places that attract crowds like Mellieħa Bay or Golden Bay. I am told that these are kept fairly clean, as they should be. However, the smaller rocky beaches also form part of our tourist product and these are dirtied by users and not cleaned enough by beach cleaners.
Often, users leave charcoal, food, nappies and all sorts of other things on the beach. When the cleaners go in the morning, they may do some cleaning but they certainly do not ensure that the beaches are cleaned properly.
If this were so, there would not be the same dirt in the same place, day after day. Maybe the president of the MHRA did not have this in mind when he spoke of not killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
He was probably alluding to other more important things. However, if we all played our part, the tourism product could be greatly enhanced and there would be more golden eggs in future, for the benefit of all our economy.
Things sound so simple but we do seem to have a knack for complicating them, because we simply assume that the good times in an economy last forever. History has shown they never do.