Gozo budget debate: Usual rhetoric!
Although I have been "trapped" in hospital for the last couple of weeks, I followed the budget debates assiduously. For obvious reasons, I followed the Gozo budget debate with particular interest and frankly, there was nothing new – just the usual rhetoric and a bunch of orchestrated clichés.
Very irresponsibly, Gozo was put in an unrealistic perspective. It is not true that things in Gozo are going fine and people have a feel good factor – quite the opposite. Gozitans are fed up of incompetent people with cushy jobs taking over attendance sheets in work places to add up duty time which in reality was spent anywhere but on the workplace. People are fed up with the administration blessing such abuses closing both eyes and ears to let everything go by.
Lately, we have people chosen from their peers to occupy posts without even a call for applications or selection boards being too much selective basing themselves on coloured criteria. Conveniently enough, none of this was mentioned during the debate.
But what irritated me most, was the ridiculous and frivolous boasting about the health sector and the environment. Gozo patients are taken daily to Malta for treatment sometimes even by helicopter – even for a simple scan. On Independence Day eve, a gentleman was taken to Malta because his nose was bleeding and there was no ENT. He was transported to Malta by ambulance and had to be kept at St Luke’s because on the way he nearly bleed to death. Why didn’t the Minister boast about such incidents! Only the dedicated hospital staff deserve to be lauded but administration have no idea of how things should be.
What did Minister for Gozo do in respect of Ramla, Hondoq and Mgarr ix-Xini? She did like Pontius Pilate. That is as far as her environmental concern goes.
One general and concluding comment about the whole thing is that Gozo needs true leadership with a backbone – people had enough.
2007 - Justyne Caruana
