The similarity is uncanny.

In 1986, there was a party in government that had forgotten the reasons for its existence.

It was led by a hand-picked leader, untested by elections.

A crucial election was coming up, keenly awaited by both sides, with signs of fin de regime all over the place.

And that government focused on two themes that it felt could help stave off the coming defeat: property development and hunting.

Of course, that government was coming to the end of five very difficult years, with its democratic credentials shot to pieces after the 1981 election, whereas this time only Alternattiva would be tempted to argue that this government came to power on the coat-tails of the EU referendum vote and hardly on its own merits.

Anyway, it was property development and hunting then, and it is property development and hunting today. Some things never change.

Ever since the Neolithic temples, the Maltese have been dabbling in stone: pulling down and re-constructing over and over again. Property development is the name of the national game, a largely misunderstood factor of the national economy. Whatever happens to the rest of the economy, property development rarely sees any recession. It may have pauses, but it rarely dips.

It distorts, big time, the rest of the economy in that it offers inducement to just holding on to your land and capitalising upon it, rather than inducing hard work, creativity (except when it has to do with taxes) and productivity.

But it works. The Labour administration of 1986 and now the PN administration of 2007 both came to see that if it is growth you want, then let property development have its head and economic growth will follow.

The issue that, with all the past and present development we have turned this fair isle into a cement conglomeration, does not seem to exercise many heads. Neither does the fact that, years ago, there was already a huge mass of unused building stock, let alone today, let alone the years to come. Nor the economic and commonsense consideration that what goes up must come down, and sooner or later the laws of supply and demand will re-assert themselves and people will get hurt, as they inevitably tend to do when anything becomes a national pastime.

On to the next national pastime: hunting. There seems to be a direct link between the construction industry and the hunting lobby, perhaps because they both share the same members. Or perhaps because they both operate in the open air – with equally destructive effects: on the land, and on whatever flies over it.

It was the Labour administration of 1986 that identified the hunting lobby as one of its main supporters and it even gave them whole areas to “conserve” and “preserve” – with very predictable results.

The present administration has not been so blatant about either construction or hunting. It created Mepa to remove property development from ministerial intervention and it is trying to worship at the EU door while trying as hard as it can to accommodate the hunting lobby.

Where it becomes funny is to try and compare today’s PN with the way the PN positioned itself in complete antithesis to the pro-construction and pro-hunting MLP administration of 1986. Yesterday’s MLP has become today’s PN, sometimes with even the same people benefiting. And where has yesterday’s PN gone? All that idealism, all that moving ahead on a grand design and towards great goals! Without ideals, there can be no politics. All that this government is going to the country with, come the approaching general election, is more of the same.

All through the current local council elections campaign, the government has been careful not to get bogged down in local issues and to keep plugging the grand design. Precisely because this grand design has come to mean more of the same, this government does not deserve to win next Saturday. It has more or less consciously shed off those areas of support it tried so hard to attract as recently as 2003 and is now embracing property development and hunting.

The Labour Party has consciously targeted local concerns. It is right to believe it should be supported to overturn the somnolent PN majority in Mosta or the feuding PN majority in Gzira, less so in believing it should retain the majorities it enjoys in some Labour strongholds where, for all Dr Sant’s percentage mania, the results are not that evident.

But there are still wide areas of the electorate whose concerns no party is picking up. Other sectors just can’t be bothered. Come the general election, these segments (plus, chillingly, lobbies such as the hunters) may well turn out to hold the trump cards.