The current parliamentary debate on energy and Enemalta is interesting in a perverse sort of way. Now that we are beyond the excitement of Malta Taghna Lkoll, the morbid fascination of a woman sobbing because all her family have cancer, and the tedium of Kenneth Zammit Tabona’s complaints that he can’t pay his air-conditioning bill (he should be able to do that if he gives his houseboy notice), reality has set in and has begun to bite hard.

Journalists are not asking questions, the prime minister has said, so that means that everything is all right and that there are not questions to be asked. That journalists are not asking questions doesn’t actually mean anything of the sort. It simply means that most find the tangled technical issues and partisan concealments far too complicated to unravel among the myriad pressures of the relentless daily grind. I do not seek to justify this, for strictly speaking it is a dereliction of duty towards our readers, but this is the true explanation that the prime minister isn’t looking for.

It goes beyond that, of course. The government-cum-Labour-Party, in its unstinting efforts at neutralising and silencing criticism, has to choose between bribing and harassing. Where it does not succeed with the former, as it has done with a few, it will proceed with the latter. Most journalists are aware of this at some level, and tiptoe around Muscat and his government in much the same way that they learned how to tiptoe around Mintoff, KMB and theirs. In those days, we didn’t even have by-lines in the newspapers, that’s how bad it was, and all newspaper columns, including the famous Page 13 in The Sunday Times, were anonymous.

Anyone who persists in his or her ‘negativity’ (the new word for democratically essential criticism) towards the government, its personnel, actions, decisions, choices and policies, will be systematically positioned as a lone lunatic with a personal agenda that is not rooted in reality. This is the Fascist way of doing things, and it is not at all new to history. When other journalists see that happening to their colleagues, they will pull back even further from attempting to do their job properly, and the inevitable happens. A government that has no fear of the press – and of the press’s readers – is a government unchecked.

Yes, we have the internet and Facebook now that we did not have then, but these do not substitute the regular media as some have sought to suggest. The mainstream media remain hugely more authoritative, at least where credible opinion is concerned. People with some degree of intelligence would rather have a properly researched newspaper investigation into the myriad mysteries surrounding the power station project than they would a few rumours on somebody’s Facebook time-line.

So far there has been nothing in the newspapers that has not emerged from the parliamentary debate, so it is on that we must – rather unsatisfactorily – depend. The government clearly knows already who will be building this power station, and it is my view that the Opposition is not pressing home on this point nearly enough. If it waits until the pseudo expression of interest process is over, and the name announced, it will be too late. They have to talk about this right now, and so does the press.

One of the most shocking facts to come out of the parliamentary debate seems to have shocked nobody at all, for it was buried deep within the newspaper reports, which seem to be jotted down on a chronological basis, according to what was said first, like the secretarial taking of dictation or minutes at a meeting. So lots of people will have missed it, when it should have been writ large in headlines. Perhaps it will have been by the time this column is published a day later.

The figures which the government is talking about, the Opposition said, indicate that it will not be needing two gas storage tanks the size of Mosta dome, but six of them, each around 45 metres high. In the election campaign, the Labour Party talked about needing 60,000 cubic metres of stored gas, even though the Nationalist Party pointed out that far more than that would be required. Now it turns out that the project will indeed demand the storage of 180,000 cubic metres instead of the 60,000 they spoke about when out for votes. But now, of course, it is too late for people to change their mind about voting positively for this, though it is not too late – rather, it is imperative – for my colleagues in the media to begin asking some proper questions, whatever their own private political beliefs might be. This is not a partisan issue and we are no longer in an electoral campaign (though even then, the questions should have been asked). This is now a matter of national importance, with long-term and far-reaching effects down the generations.

 

 

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