Ralph Cassar has sent you an article from timesofmalta.com.
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Friday, September 28, 2007
< The genuine article >
by Harry Vassallo
After months of political campaigning and institutional bullying to make a golf course out of the magical Xaghra l-Hamra, the Prime Minister made a full U-turn and claimed merit for letting the scales fall from his eyes and acknowledging that such a place should never be destroyed.
It was a virtuoso performance marred only by the failure to name the park after Julian Manduca who deserves the honour more than anyone I know. Within a few months, the Prime Minister has pulled off another feat of political gymnastics which puts all his predecessors in the shade.
After years of indecision and mixed messages over the future of Gozo, at the end of a term in government which has seen Gozo relegated to also-ran status, the Prime Minister has now announced that Gozo deserves a promise of more attention.
Brilliant, what more could we ask for? In recent weeks the Prime Minster has behaved like a Green Father Christmas granting our every wish. How could we criticise him for it? Perhaps we feel it is all too good to be true. Perhaps we are old enough not to believe in Father Christmas and especially not at election time.
After 18 years of having the Greens pointing out to everyone who would listen that Malta desperately needs crucial institutional reforms such as the introduction of a Whistleblower Act to make corruption dangerous for all involved, a Freedom of Information Act - to secure respect for private citizens in their interface with authority - and a tight regulation of the financing of political parties to avert the real danger of any political party becoming a single party government effectively owned by its financiers, the Prime Minister pulled it all out of a hat as though he had understood it all at very long last.
You have to be very naïve or a dyed-in-the-wool partisan not to smell something fishy. Why now? Why not when he first came to office? It would not have cost the country a cent. Could it possibly be that the crucial importance of such reforms came to be recognised only on the eve of an election? Is it only now that the Prime Minster came to recognise the danger to democracy in allowing unlimited covert financing of political parties? Is it only now that it clicked that citizens should have a right to know everything that is not necessarily secret? Did it dawn on him just a few days ago that giving civil servants immunity to reveal corruption brings all and any sleaze networks under threat? It is about as fishy as his sudden recovery of environmental sensitivity over Ix-Xaghra l-Hamra.
The Xaghra l-Hamra conversion is meant to be a sop to all environmentalists. They are being invited to be grateful that at last something good has come their way and to end their complaints about the ever-mounting environmental toll of excess construction, illegal extension of development zones and the issue of development permits for damaging mega-projects at a rate never witnessed before. It is good PR but an extremely bad trade off.
It is the same with Gozo. No mere electoral sop in beautification and alternative energy projects will ever make up for the damage done and the damage yet to be done to the island. Can it make Gozitans forget the neglect of the past four years and more? From a Green perspective it is a great victory; the Prime Minister is listening very carefully to our music and dancing to our tune. We are not yet in Parliament, nowhere near coalition negotiations and the Prime Minister is studying the proposals we have made in the past months and years and promising to implement our electoral manifesto before we have published it.
From a voter’s perspective it all lacks credibility. So we have an area declared to be of inestimable natural heritage value and a credible person appointed to be the chief guardian of conservation areas. Where is the legal structure to make it all enforceable? The White Paper on freedom of information makes great reading except the part that makes it clear that it will not have effect prior to the next election, nor will the Whistleblower Act, nor any legislation on the financing of political parties.
On the other hand, the proposed constitutional changes guaranteeing proportionality only to the parties presently represented in Parliament will definitely become law before the election - so much for democratic credentials and promises of institutional reform. While the Prime Minister throws sops at environmentalists, the mega projects causing irreversible damage far and wide but particularly in the North Harbour area and in Gozo are going ahead.
There is no plan. There are only electoral geegaws. A serious government would have involved all stakeholders in a profound analysis of what Gozo needs and what Gozitans want and would have made it known years ago. Gozo fails to engage fully with EU membership opportunities because it has remained in a state of indecision.
Is it to become as built up and over-exploited as Malta or will it give value to its natural and landscape assets to secure a future for its population? Is there a plan to develop employment opportunities in Gozo which are permanent and free of seasonality? Is there any plan at all except for sudden announcements of apparently large public expenditure but which has no utilisation framework to give it credibility? Will Gozitans believe any of it when they have had to suffer for so many long years for the completion of the Mgarr ferry terminal?
At the end of the report on the 20 Grand Harbour projects so loudly boasted about in anticipation by the government, in the very last lines, the writers note that all the projects described therein will require further detailed studies. It is a laconic admission that all the projects which all architectural and construction firms are beginning to vie for are at the electoral smokescreen stage.
It is the same with Gozo: Nobody serious can hope to be absolved of five years of unmitigated neglect combined with a series of major environmental threats and all-encompassing cronyism by throwing a mere promise at the problems on the eve of an election. It all stretches the government’s credibility paper thin.
This is what the Prime Minister still seems unable to understand. The Maltese electorate no longer believes this nonsense. In fact, making such promises on the eve of an election may be worse than not making them at all. There is massive doubt that any of it will come to pass. People expect politics from politicians, serious politics not clever conjuring tricks.
On the contrary, nobody at all doubts for an instant that, with the Greens in a position to make decisions, all the PN’s plagiarised promises will definitely be kept. The eco-island project for Gozo requires much more than an uncosted so-called plan. The Greens will very definitely demand profound institutional reform which will place the political class under permanent scrutiny. We have everything to gain by it.
Could it possibly be that the Prime Minister has not yet twigged that the EU citizens of Malta and Gozo will no longer be satisfied with cheap imitations when they can have the genuine article? Why should they be seduced with too little greenwash and too late, when they can have the real thing and be certain that such promises will be kept?
Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green party.
www.alternattiva.org.mt
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