The roadmap to national dialogue

His Majesty King Abdullah has said it all when he told the National Policies Council on Saturday that it is unfair for citizens to be left alone to carry the burdens of the financial reform.

The King said to the council, and through it to the entire country, that all state institutions are required to tighten and rationalise spending. The King also said that taxes should be balanced with the quality of services; something that has struck him as a big problem after making an announced visit to Al Bashir Hospital last week.

This is the roadmap that the King wanted the government and all other shareholders to pursue in the effort to launch a comprehensive and rational national dialogue, with a view to reaching a national consensus on the tax law in question.

Parliamentarians, political parties, professional associations, trade unions, academicians, journalists and civil society are all invited to take an active part in this national dialogue.

Obviously, that is the wise way to go about addressing the national uproar caused by the new draft law on taxation. Short of that, the country may succumb to even deeper chaos, instability and disruptions, whose total cost on the national economy could be staggering.

The ultimate responsibility for settling this controversy is two-fold. First, the corrective measures that fall on the government with a view to genuinely cut wasteful spending, which is plentiful, and then to rationalise expenditure across the board. This would include the elimination of bureaucracies that are not absolutely necessary. The second part of the equation falls on the shoulders of tax payers, who must observe the law and pay their taxes on time.

Once the two sides cooperate on the implementation of the tax law that the national consensus can come up with, there could be no excuse to prolong the deadlock over the taxation policy of the country.