The Housing Authority chairman is taking time off her heavy workload to write in every newspaper which will carry her writing that AD wants to introduce taxes. She sounds remarkably like the Labour Party she so often attacks.

In her article “The taxing of empty houses” (TMID, 11 July), Marisa Micallef describes the outrageous situation of controlled rents and accepts it as part of the landscape. It gave her no popularity points with the thousands of dispossessed owners of these properties and the thousands more still smarting from having to dispose of such properties for a pittance under duress in the past 60 years.

It is not enough that she recognises that the situation is unfair or even insane. What does she propose to do about it? The matter has been firmly placed on the country’s agenda by the Green Party through its referendum bid and all she can propose is for the government to invest more in housing.

She is not simply an opinion writer fully entitled to an opinion whenever she pleases. She is the chairman of the Housing Authority, engaged in an unseemly polemic with a political party on a matter within her official remit.

The Greens are not in parliament. We are years away from it and probably decades away from having the clout to pass any law against the opposition of others. The recent charades proposing yet another impossible electoral hurdle, make it clear that we are in the condition of ordinary citizens: forced to submit to an intolerable situation perpetuated by lovers of the status quo such as herself.

As ordinary citizens, the only tool at our disposal in addressing the absurd iniquity of the rent laws is to propose to have them abrogated in a referendum. No ordinary citizen has been trusted by our legislators to propose anything and seek support for it in a referendum.

As a Green Party, our core interest in abolishing the outstanding cruelty of the rent laws is not only the matter of social justice to dispossessed owners (which we presume we share not only with the other political parties but also with every civilised person) but a matter of the rational use of resources.

There is no Green Party in the world facing a situation where one of every four urban properties stands vacant while property prices are skyrocketing out of reach of a widening swathe of the population while an amazing number of properties are rented for virtually nothing.

The situation is simply surreal. The only reason we are not all stunned by the utter stupidity of it is that it has been around for 60 years and nearly all of us have acclimatised to the insanity. It is our function, not only as a Green Party but also as the country’s real hope of escape from zero-sum politics, to point out that the Emperor has no new clothes, indeed no clothes at all on this issue.

Just to add to the surreality we have the Housing Authority chairman entering the fray in person to defend the status quo. What does she think she is doing? Politics? Defending her job? Shooting down the Greens out of sheer habit?

As she and everybody else very well knows, the Greens cannot impose any tax on anybody. Perhaps this is why we feel freer to point out the advantages of changes to the tax system which can address crucial issues. The other parties have hamstrung one another on the tax issue.

It is not Green irresponsibility but Green honesty. We all pay taxes anyway so why not use the system to achieve worthwhile culture changes where necessary? Green policy on taxation includes the use of taxes to penalise or reward those who do or do not create a burden or a cost to society.

It is far from being the only way in which a functioning rental market can be achieved. Time and time again, in our proposals on the subject, we have listed possible incentives to owners which should precede the establishment of any disincentive.

Owners willing to restore their properties to rent them should be given very significant financial assistance. We have proposed tax rebates on rental income. We have proposed a 10-year tax holiday for income from former controlled rent properties once the referendum releases them. We are open to suggestions from everybody and anybody, including the Housing Authority chairman, on how best to achieve a functioning rental market. We have opened the debate. We never claimed a monopoly on good ideas and always remain eager to hear of more.

We have had the decency not to publish a Green blueprint for reform of the situation and for the establishment of an undistorted property market, simply because it is beyond our possibilities to promise it.

We did not want to deceive anybody and if Ms Micallef had had the interest to show up at the Public Information Meeting held some weeks ago, she would have heard me spell this out loud and clear.

Everybody who signs our referendum petition is an ally and in our condition; we all know that the future is in the hands of the other political parties. We are pushing for change because we are convinced that the past has been intolerable and the present seems worse, because we want to give the other parties the excuse they need to address this situation and because we know that we can jolt the status quo.

The only promise we have made is that at the end of this campaign there will exist in Malta a compact, vocal and articulate lobby for change which will never again be ignored by our political adversaries whether or not their coma persists on other issues.

The people who have been cheated for 60 years by everybody in office during that time deserve to be treated better than hunters and boathouse squatters and certainly will be.

We do not need Ms Micallef to tell us that there are many tenants in controlled rent relationships who will require assistance. What we are saying is that bearing the burden for social housing for 60 years is far more than can be expected of private citizens and that it is high time that the state bear its public responsibility towards them. We will never be cruel to tenants who deserve assistance.

Only the government can be cruel. The Greens will not pass the law they will make necessary by the abrogation of the rent laws, it will be a PN majority and a Labour minority who will debate the transition in parliament. If Ms Micallef has any fears about the fate of deserving tenants she should address them elsewhere.

We are not describing any win-win situation. What we are saying is that the status quo is a definite lose-lose situation with further depredations of our disappearing countryside, property prices skyrocketing beyond reason, the numbers of the homeless and the potentially homeless growing in geometric progression and the property bubble inflated far beyond sustainability. This is the status quo which our Housing Authority chairman defends.

She then has the cheek to ask for the government to throw more money at the problem in the way it has done so far, only in bigger spadefuls. Why should anyone build more houses in Malta? Why should the Housing Authority be given more money to act as a developer when we all know that an astounding surplus exists? Where will the money she asks for come from if not from taxes, taxes, taxes?

If anybody in office listens to Ms Micallef we will all embark on a disastrous course, in which as property prices continue to rise and more and more people are obliged to apply to her authority for the hope of having a home, the government will be obliged to fork out ever more tax money to provide for more homes which in real terms we do not need.

She attempts to terrify property owners about a Green vacant property tax which they know the Greens cannot impose while herself proposing, from a key position of authority, a structural tax sink which will become a vortex that will swallow up the country’s resources ever more. The Micallef vision of the future is a situation in which property prices have soared above the clouds, Malta has been completely built up, the vacancy rate has reached 50 per cent and most of the country’s budget is spent on providing housing for the otherwise well to do apart from the down and out because none of us can afford to think of buying a home anymore.

This of course is not only the Micallef future of Malta but the future by default, determined by the fact that our political adversaries have been in a trance over the rent laws for 60 years and seem unable to shake themselves out of it without extreme Green pressure.

Dr Harry Vassallo is Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party chairperson