As the general election campaign winds its way into its final week, we take a look at the two main political parties’ five most ambitious electoral proposals. Here is what are, in our view, the Nationalist Party’s top five:
€2.3 billion light rail metro system
A new mass transport system has been on the cards for as long time now and so far proposal after proposal for a metro/underground have been deemed unfeasible. Now the Nationalist Party has unveiled plans for €2.3 billion light rail system that PN leader Simon Busuttil himself on Friday described as “ambitious”.
Perhaps even more ambitious is the fact that the PN has pledged that the first of four metro lines, some of which will be underground and some at street level, will be completed before the first legislature is concluded – i.e. within five years.
Nullify the Gozo General Hospital privatisation contract
PN leader Simon Busuttil has pledged to have his Gozo minister effectively tear up the contract privatising the Gozo General Hospital on the first day of being in power. While this may be something of as foregone conclusion considering the opposition’s criticism of the contract, it may be somewhat ambitious considering that withdrawing from such contracts would require some extensive legal legwork.
Plus, the Opposition would also presumably have to first see the full contract and what it actually stipulated as the version released was so heavily redacted that it was more black than black on white.
Give families €10,000 to move to Gozo
The PN’s bid to repopulate Malta’s sister island of Gozo came under heavy fire in the first week of the campaign, when Dr Busuttil pledged a cash incentive of €10,000 for families moving to Gozo or for Gozitan families returning to Gozo.
While on the surface the pledge may not seem all that ambitious, the workings of the system will have to be fool proof to prevent the considerable risk of fraud.
A constitutional amendment for a balanced budget
In an obvious reaction on the heels of the government’s vaunted achievement of attaining the first budgetary surplus in decades, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil has pledged to introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that the government would maintain a balanced budget every year.
While the amendment will hold caveats for exceptional circumstances such as international recessions, the pledge is ambitious because it would effectively provide the state with very little room for fiscal manoeuvre, not even within the three percent threshold that Maastricht Treaty binds eurozone countries to the limit.
Scrapping the Zonqor Point project
The PN pledge to scrap the controversial Zonqor Point American University of Malta project dead in its tracks if elected to power may resonate with the environmental lobby, which has vociferously objected to the granting of Outside development Zone land to a private educational institution.
But as in the case of the Gozo hospital contract, the ways and means by which a Nationalist government would manage to extricate itself from a contract signed by its predecessor are dubious and would require a careful legal study.