Over four pages inside today’s Guernsey Press we set out responses from States members to some challenging questions about their pension arrangements, which are based on them putting in £1 to every £4 from the taxpayer and the taxpayer also picking up any shortfall in the fund’s ability to pay them a guaranteed sum after the age of 65.

Most were helpful and answered fully. Few appeared to see anything wrong with the scheme, based on that enjoyed by public sector workers, although the cost of providing the benefits is ultimately uncontrollable and the risk of doing so rests entirely with the taxpayer.

However, the purpose of our questionnaire – what we asked is set out on page 21 – was not to criticise States members. They are, after  all, not doing anything wrong. The ‘rightness’ of the pension scheme is based in an independent panel suggesting the benefit as part of their remuneration package and members of the day voting it into effect.

Whether that was morally defensible is a different matter. But the point we wished to make, and it comes through in many of the responses, is that there really is very little thought given to the interests of the taxpayer.

Whoever initially came up with the pension scheme saw nothing wrong with making islanders pay what amounts to a super contribution to the scheme while the deputies’ is in comparison paltry or in making it a defined benefit scheme, a further liability on the pockets of Guernsey people.

In turn, no one in the system – be that advisers or politicians – thought to question the cost of what they were doing because, well, the taxpayer is always there to pick up the tab.

As we have argued before, if you don’t have to earn the money, you care little how it is spent.

That institutionalised casualness is endemic across government, which is why writing off many millions in the debacle over waste management was so easy for deputies to do.

They also have a pension system that gives them far more than they put in and is firmly biased against the taxpayer.

The issue, largely ducked in responses to our survey, is what they are going to do about it now that voters are aware of what’s going on.