Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1479276
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 18 SEPTEMBER 2022 OPINION 10 Raphael Vassallo OPINION Air Malta is also 'too big to fail'… LADIES and gentlemen: wel- come aboard what may well turn out to be Air Malta's last-ever flight, as our national airline. This is your Captain speaking (well, not really. It's actually Fi- nance Minister Clyde Caruana, quoted in yesterday's paper) and if I were you, I'd fasten your seatbelts… because we may be in for a little 'turbu- lence', here and there. "The company needs a cap- ital injection; but when and how this will happen depends on the decision the European Commission will make […] I will do nothing at the airline that does not enjoy the Euro- pean Commission's support. […] We cannot have an airline that flies to Brussels, Charles de Gaulle and Heathrow, and loses money. Many will criti- cise our decisions, but practic- es that make no business sense cannot continue." Right: that's an awful lot for us to sink our teeth into; so I'll start by pointing out the only two areas where there is bound to be widespread agreement. The first, and most obvious, is where he says that: "many will criticise [his government's] de- cisions". Well, who could pos- sibly argue with that? Certain- ly, not me (in fact, I agree with Clyde Caruana so much, that I'll be doing nothing but 'criti- cising his decisions' for the rest of this article…) The second is that: "practic- es that make no business sense cannot continue." Here, ad- mittedly, there may be a few random dissenters out there: mostly among the 500-or-so Air Malta employees who have already been (or are about to be) 'off-loaded', with the rest of the excess baggage… But as for everyone else – in- cluding this newspaper, which has been commenting editorial- ly on the 'need to cut down ex- penditure at Air Malta' for DEC- ADES – it's pretty much what we've been arguing, all along. Yes, Minister: there are in- deed certain 'practices' at Air Malta that simply 'cannot con- tinue'. And right at the top of the list, there's the consistent tendency of successive govern- ments – both Labour and Na- tionalist – to treat the national airline as if it were some kind of glorified 'employment agen- cy', for the exclusive benefit of the party-in-government. Then again, however: it is on- ly these (and other) 'bad prac- tices' that have to go…. and certainly not THE ENTIRE BLEEDING AIRLINE! Yet if we follow Clyde Caru- ana's logic to its only possible conclusion… that's where we'll all end up, you know. Let's start with the only example of 'bad practice' that he himself actually mentioned: "We can- not have an airline that flies to Brussels, Charles de Gaulle and Heathrow, and loses money"... Erm, sorry, but… 'YES, WE BLOODY-WELL CAN!' Honestly: I never thought I'd see the day, when I'd have to explain the basics of Socialism to a supposedly 'Socialist' Fi- nance Minister. But it's called "absorbing the cost of (or 'sub- sidising', if you prefer) an es- sential national service"… … and it is also precisely what Clyde Caruana's Labour gov- ernment does in virtually every other sector; and even boasts about doing, at every single opportunity! (So much so, that yesterday's main headline – on the same day, please note – was: 'Finance Minister pledges €600 million spend next year to cushion higher energy, food prices'. Go figure…) Naturally, it becomes a lot easier to justify this kind of subsidy, if you're not also 'max- imising the cost, by needlessly over-bloating the service to the point of bankruptcy'. But again: the actual problem concerns the 'over-bloating'… NOT the service itself (which is anything but 'needless'). What Clyde Caruana is ef- fectively suggesting, however, is that the national service we are talking about here – whose strategic importance is some- thing else I think we can all safely agree on – can only be provided, if it is 'profitable'. In other words: in order to survive, Air Malta would have to be managed along exact- ly the same lines as any other, purely commercial airline. And we all know what that means in practice, don't we? "Route no longer profitable? Route no longer exists… simple as that." By which point, of course, there would be precious little difference between our sup- posedly 'national airline', and the service it provides… and all the cut-throat budget airlines it is in competition with (and which – let's face it – are all 'here today, gone tomorrow'.) Now: just imagine, for a mo- ment, that Clyde Caruana's La- bour government were to apply the same logic to ALL the es- sential services it is currently subsidising (and to the tune of much, MUCH more than the measly '150 million' cash-in- jection required by Air Malta). The National Health Service, for instance. How many of Ma- ter Dei Hospital's wards, do you reckon, currently 'make a profit by the end of the fiscal year'? How many of the State- run Health Centres, all over the island, 'pay out annual dividends, to their sharehold- ers'? And would we even have something like a State-provid- ed 'Accident and Emergency Department'… if its business model required it to be just as 'profitable', as any old private hospital or clinic? No, no, make no mistake: un- der those circumstances, we wouldn't even have any NHS at all. And it's the same with ed- ucation: if government were to axe every State-run school that