Three tenors. This was the first association at the press conference held this week, ahead of the summer ‘break’, by Deputy Prime Minister Branko Grčić and ministers Ivan Vrdoljak and Siniša Hajdaš Dončić.
The second impression is that the ‘tenors’ appeared before the audience as a punishment. The opera chief forced them to show up and sing a few well-known arias. They did it reluctantly, as if they themselves do not believe in the quality of the libretto and music.
All three ministers are among those with whom it is not uncomfortable to be at some gathering. They are open to discussion, intellectual sparring, and willing to listen to criticism… But as a whole, together with other members of the choir Banski dvori, especially including conductor Zoran Milanović, they appear increasingly unconvincing.
The central part of the press conference, where the trio tried to encourage themselves with numbers that foreign investments in Croatia are growing, was the one in which the ministers admitted they have no idea how much and what private investments are in Croatia. Even more discouraging is that they see the solution to this problem in requesting the State Bureau of Statistics to start monitoring private investments.
Stumbling in the dark The Kukuriku coalition, whose economic program has been reduced to calling for larger investments since day one, has been in power for almost two years. And only now in Banski dvori do they conclude that they do not know what is happening in the economy. This year, they based recovery on about 15 billion kuna of public company investments and 50 billion kuna of private company investments. And no one thought to monitor private investments for two years!
While the government sends a request to statistics, and then statistics creates a methodology, and while that enters the statistical research program… we are not facing a lost mandate but a lost decade.
The admission that the government does not know what is happening with private sector investments is just the tip of the iceberg. Investments are actually a completely wrongly chosen priority of this unprepared government. The real dramatic nature of the admission from Banski dvori is that the government does not know what is happening in the private sector. It is enough to have contacts with a hundred companies in the country to obtain relevant data for managing the national economy even without statistical research.
Well, well, there is someone who closely monitors domestic companies. Finance Minister Slavko Linić. His tax officials know who has how much in the treasury. And with pre-bankruptcy settlements, there is also an overview of the sickest part of the national economic scene.
About the successful ones or those on the verge of being successful, the government obviously does not know. And they do not make an effort to find out. Entrepreneurs are generally ridiculed and their boards are soap in public. Instead of gathering all those who have not yet been too wounded and starting to pull them out of the recession. If you expect someone to invest 50 billion kuna of their (or borrowed, but mortgage-covered) money in a year, then common sense says you need to help them. Ask them what they need. Motivate them.
