The Boneheadedness Of The Eco-Tax

I know I shouldn't but I can't help myself. Anglicising or finding close similarities to English words from names from other cultures is not very fair. But I fear I have to indulge in this somewhat puerile exercise in the case of the regional minister for transport. I wasn't going to, I really had no desire to, but when I started scratching my own head, I was left with no option. The minister's name is Boned. Not too far removed from the nickname of Oasis's rhythm guitarist or from the American slang which gave the English language an insult and the subsequent noun.

The head scratching had to do with the eco-tax. Not the fact of it, but the preference for its collection. At airports and ports. How the hell's that going to work? It is this preference which leads one to conclude that the regional government and its unfortunately named transport minister are engaging in boneheadedness. Stubbornness, obstinacy, foolishness. They're bringing an eco-tax on themselves, pressing ahead with it, getting themselves deeper into a hole from which they won't be able to escape by burying themselves in the impracticalities of the collection preference.

Sr. Boned would like to have a meeting with the minister for development, Ana Pastor, she the ultimate shepherd(ess) of all who are packed into the pens of arrivals, having obediently followed in their flocks the stark instruction of baggage reclaim. As development minister, she has the final say on all things airports. Boned wants to have a word, to ask her to let the Balearics collect the eco-tax at airports (and ports).

The chances of her agreeing to this are probably slightly less than zero. She is, as the regional government is only too aware, a member of the Partido Popular, with whom the parties of the regional government have their disagreements and differences in ideology. An area of disagreement is the eco-tax. The PP's secretary-of-state for tourism, Mallorca's very own Isabel Borrego, has declared her opposition to such a tax: it is unlikely to curry much favour elsewhere in the PP national government.

Ideology, however, has typically played little part in tourist-tax introduction elsewhere. Catalonia is not a left-wing administration, but it has a tax. If leftism were a pre-requisite, then Andalusia, continuously socialist-led since democracy, would have had one years ago. They don't even really talk about it down there. Ideology shouldn't, therefore, be a factor, but when Pastor is presented with the Boned request, one would trust that one of her questions would be, assuming she is even vaguely minded to agree in principle to the request - how will you do it?

I'm assuming, hoping that the government has actually given this some thought. For example, how does it intend processing eco-tax payment from the some 80,000 arrivals on a busy day in summer? Think about if for a moment, because there are times of days when there are significant peaks in the volume of passengers. What will they do? Have a tax check-in? The mind boggles.

There are other practicalities. How is a tourist distinguished from a non-tourist? It might be easy to identify many a tourist - lads on tour t-shirts, pasty faces and what have you - but there would still have to be some way of filtering. How do they do that? Coming in on a charter plane would make the task easier, but not everyone does. Has the government not noticed the increase in the volume of direct-booked, low-cost air travellers? And not everyone travelling Ryanair is a tourist by any means.

Then there would be the charge. If it is to be, as hinted, one or two euros per night, how do they check the length of stay? Is there to be some sort of stamp to check a tourist in, to be presented on departure in order to verify that the right amount has been paid? Are tourists to be tagged and geo-located in order to check the time they are in Mallorca? 

But while these logistical issues - pretty important ones at that - raise all sorts of questions, is there not something altogether more fundamental? Image. Perception. If, as a government, you are introducing a tax system, which will not be universally popular, and you do so by presenting the need for a visitor to hand over money the moment he or she steps on dry Mallorcan land, do you not create a negative perception? If this is then compounded by queuing to make the payment, by some system of verification, then you face almost certain PR disaster.

This is why I'm scratching my head, perplexed by the apparent boneheadedness. But then, they must have thought about all this and will already be hard at work designing a flawless system. If only.