There are times when I think I’ve fallen down the rabbit-hole, and this is one of them. Labour MP Joe Farrugia – believe me when I say that I had never heard of him before now – said yesterday in parliament that Malta should start thinking in terms of ‘halal tourism’. I was fascinated. Believe me, too, when I say that I had never heard of halal tourism, either (life seems to be getting more and more complicated with all these sub-divisions and categories). So I Googled it, and then understood that Mr Farrugia must have done the same, because the definition he gave in parliament was straight out of Wikipedia: hotels that don’t serve alcohol and which have separate swimming-pools for men and women. Then, of course, there’s the halal food – which everyone knows about. Further enquiry led me to halal flights, on which there are no pork products or alcohol, and religious videos are provided and prayer times observed. Could this be a niche for Air Malta? You have to laugh.
The whole thing makes no business sense at all. A properly halal hotel would have to survive only on the business of extremely conservative Muslims who want that kind of thing, because obviously, nobody else would go. Who else would wish to stay in a hotel that doesn’t allow alcohol on the premises and which insists that families are split up for swimming – the boys with daddy and the girls with mummy, or holidaying couples spending days by the pool, apart?
It’s a lot of investment, a great deal of risk, and the business just isn’t there. Extremely conservative Muslims who wish to holiday in a halal hotel are unlikely to choose a non-Muslim country to begin with. In fact, the epicenter of halal tourism is Turkey. But beyond that, Maltese society makes manifest its mistrust, suspicion and even hatred of Muslims, who are tolerated only as a source of revenue in rent and retail, largely thanks to the good offices of Mosta accountant and former Labour Party treasurer Joseph Sammut, who has famously brought in many hundreds of Libyan citizens under one pretext or another. So would Maltese people have a change of heart and accept halal tourists if they bring in the money?
Probably, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that halal tourism can’t take place in a country that is anything but halal. Malta’s tourism areas are replete with everything that is the antithesis of halal: lots of bars, nightclubs, restaurants that serve alcohol and non-halal food, girls in the streets wearing next to nothing, people tottering around drunk and throwing up, taxi-drivers trying to pimp a ride (literally), strip clubs, lap-dancing clubs, and nudie joints. How halal is that? So the halal tourist to Malta goes to his halal hotel and then can’t leave it because of the shocks to his system.
Joe Farrugia’s proposal makes no sense, but it’s really odd that he made it in the first place. I get the feeling that he was browsing the internet, read something about halal tourism, and thought ‘how great for Malta – I’ll bring it up in parliament and get myself some attention’. He got attention, all right, but it was not the sort he wanted.
Simon Busuttil was right to bring up in parliament, in his reply to the Budget speech, the issue of cronies, friends and family being put on the state payroll. People enjoyed that speech. They thought it was good and strong. This is the single issue that gets to people the most. Forget corruption in big government projects – it’s what they can relate to that counts. And don’t for a moment make the mistake of thinking that it is all about jealousy. Those days are long gone. People now understand that a government cannot simply put its friends on the payroll, and that this is fundamentally wrong. They expect an open call for applications and a transparent interview process, and may the best man or woman get the job.
The government has circumvented this by calling every job it creates for cronies and family members a “position of trust”. Positions of trust are, strictly speaking, only for key members of a cabinet minister’s private secretariat and similar, and that for obvious reasons. But now we have “positions of trust” cropping up in all government institutions, corporations and departments. Identity Malta, for example, appears to be solely composed of people occupying positions of trust, including the girlfriend of the Family and Social Policy Minister, and the organisation itself is headed by somebody who failed to be elected to parliament on the Labour ticket in March 2013.
This is not what people were promised. It could not be further removed, for example, from the promise the Labour leader made, to camera, that the directors of government organisations and corporations would be chosen via an open call for expressions of interest, and that the public would be asked to vote for them. The ‘public vote’ bit was utterly crazy, and I said so at the time. But directors really have to be chosen on the basis of fitness for purpose and not on cosiness with the government. The fact that they are cosy with the government would not upset people so much if they were also competent, but in so many cases, they are plainly not the best man or woman for the job. And it is obvious to even the ordinary man in the street that what they have been given, through these jobs and positions, is an undemanding and lucrative sinecure for the next few years.
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