I don’t know of any country that reveres the Eurovision Song Contest more than we do, but since the Maltese love cheese more than pastizzi, there will be few readers out there who haven’t heard Abba’s famous line from their song Money, Money, Money where Agnetha and Anni-Frid belt out at the top of their microscopic metallic skirts that “it must be funny in a rich man’s world”.

And funny indeed it is, in a land where you can now not only be paid for giving birth to a child but for adopting an animal too.

Clearly, there must be a money orchard somewhere that I’ve apparently lost the map to.

I remember once teaching English as a foreign language when I was in my early 20s. We had some chapter about Maltese education and one of the brighter bulbs in the chandelier asked about the local scene and how our university system worked. She then asked me about how expensive the fees were to attend and sat in hushed, shocked silence as I told her that over here we were actually paid to go to get an education.

It’s pretty incredible when you think about it but we live in the sort of country where you are literally rewarded for everything, from getting knocked up and claiming not to know who the father is to being unwilling to do a menial job, to going to school and getting an education and now, lo and behold, if you actually go to a shelter and adopt an animal, someone will actually pat you on the back and pay you out of taxpayers’ money for doing something nice.

We need to teach our leaders that we can’t be bought with a few cheap frills: doing the right thing should never come at a price

It’s beyond ludicrous and continues to enforce this puerile, post-colonial, entitled attitude that has left many Maltese people thinking that they deserve handouts literally just for breathing the air around them.

It is not the State’s, or rather the taxpayer’s, responsibility to foot bills where the government decides to act like some rich sugar daddy. There are literally hundreds of other places where this money could be better spent and if our ministers have no ideas where, I will happily send them a list and physically point them in the right directions.

We can even start the discussion here by talking about the shortage of breast care nurses at the MDH clinic, the understaffing of Malta’s Refugee Commission despite the fact that we receive the second highest amount of asylum-seeking applications in Europe, the improvement of HIV medication or actually paying teachers better wages so that we can end this cycle of ignorance and educate our children to do better than we are apparently capable of.

By all means, help the abandoned animals, but if anything, give the money to the struggling sanctuaries, not to Ċikku and Peppi as a reward for basically being decent.

We need to teach our leaders that we can’t be bought with a few cheap frills: doing the right thing should never come at a price.