In the calendar of historic political landmarks, tomorrow is supposed to be a red-letter day. For those of you who are still unaware, tomorrow morning Cabinet will be meeting to discuss the long awaited (58 years to be exact!) Rent Reform White Paper. Hopefully, for those of you who have long-suffered the injustice of our rent regime, this reform will mark a change in your fortunes. If the reform is carefully designed and holistic it will also translate into a benefit for most of us – certainly for our children. One thing it must definitely not do, directly or indirectly, is benefit property speculation.
Alternattiva Demokratika truly welcomes this reform. Allow the Greens to take some merit for this important political development. In May we launched a campaign to enforce an abrogative referendum on the rent laws. That campaign, which is intended to collect some 30,000 signatures to force government’s hand to hold a referendum, is still ongoing. The campaign has not yet reached its intended goal to wrap up the signature collection process; we expect the process to be concluded in the first quarter of the New Year. However we are more than convinced that our efforts have borne fruit – they have certainly got the government to react. We saw yet another example of this last week, when just two days after the Greens announced a public consultation exercise in order to finalise their proposals on rent reform, Minister Cristina announced in Parliament that the White Paper would be presented to Cabinet on Monday 12 December. Excellent!
The contents of the White Paper will remain unknown for a while. However we do hope that this will not be another lukewarm and political damage-limitation exercise in the style of the 1995 reform. Landlords cannot be expected to continue dishing out social services any further. They have to start enjoying the fruits of
their assets without any
more politically-driven delay. While I am sure that a reasonable transition period is acceptable, another decade of that ‘let’s wait-and-see’ political game is not!
This is not the place and time to reveal the Greens’ proposals on rent reform. After digesting the ideas and recommendations we are currently receiving from various stakeholders, we will be in a position to publish our proposals early next year. We are working to ensure that our proposals will serve to improve the reform to be announced in the White Paper. At the very least, we expect the White Paper to deal in no uncertain terms with the gross anomalies of the existing rent regime. These should include for example the elimination of the right of inheritance of leases, the stepped liberalisation of commercial leases, and proper assignment of responsibility for extraordinary repairs.
Equally important in the reform process is working to ensure a proper mechanism to provide social assistance to needy tenants. Alternattiva Demokratika insisted from the outset that this reform must not remedy one injustice just to introduce another. The vulnerable must always be protected – the question is “by whom”? Last week in Parliament, Mario de Marco stated that the difficulty of the reform is achieving a balance between abused landlords and deserving tenants – correct. That balance will only be achieved if government underwrites the financial burden of rent subsidy. There is no other way out of the present system! Raising the money to do so is a headache for the government. I promise to propose our ideas... in the New Year though!
As I said at the start of this article, tomorrow is supposed to be an important day for many because it could see the start of proper rent reforms. However, tomorrow is not a great day for Sea Malta and its employees (or ex-employees perhaps?) In fact tomorrow is the beginning of the end of the life of this company – the liquidation process will be set in motion. The Greens, as some of you may have noted, kept very mum on this issue. The reason is that we feared this story could have the kind of nasty ending we are now witnessing, so we took the wise decision not to politicise the matter further. Since the deal (or deed) is done, I will break our silence.
The GWU really messed this one up. They should have worked to close the deal, rather than playing cat and mouse with Minister Gatt. Tony Zarb took a very ill-timed and reckless gamble with other people’s livelihood. That was not the way to defend workers’ rights. He should know that, love him or hate him, Austin Gatt never bluffs! Like Maggie Thatcher, he derives a quasi-morbid pleasure from humiliating and crushing his opponents – he does not normally weigh in the social collateral damage. Wisely and somewhat cynically, Gatt had a back-up plan to support industrial and commercial enterprises if the deal were to fall through. Did he bother with a backup plan for the 140 employees of Sea Malta? The really sad bit of this story is that the only winner is the Italian shipping line, which gets all that it wanted without paying one cent. There are many losers though. The Maltese government, the Maltese taxpayer and some 140 employees unfortunately, all lose big time. Unwittingly, Tony Zarb has lost over 100 members, and some highly-opportunistic employees will probably lose their handsome redundancy payments – frankly, in these two cases, it’s no skin off my nose, and I really do not care.
Away from the finger pointing and blame sharing post-mortem, it is worth looking at what a lost opportunity Sea Malta was. The company, a critical pillar of Labour’s drive in the 1970s to support Maltese industry, enjoyed a virtual monopoly on a shipping route for more than 30 years. In normal circumstances this company would have made mega-profits and used these to expand its services; it would have been possible to develop a shipping line operating within the Mediterranean, linking established ports in Italy and Spain to ports in developing countries like Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. After 30 years, Sea Malta should have been operating a small fleet of vessels rather than one and a half boats. However this is Malta, a country where short-term partisan political needs have always taken precedence over commercial good sense. The company became, like scores of other public sector enterprises, a provider of jobs-for-the-boys, for both parties! It takes some nerve to blame this company’s inability to operate profitability because it is a State-owned company. The government still owns 60 per cent of Maltacom and is making untold millions – the difference is that politicians keep their fingers out of this company. The problem with Sea Malta was not that it was State-owned, but that it was State-run, or rather Minister-driven for the last 18 years by the same government that gave up on it!
The Greens encourage government to do all that is possible so that many, if not all, ex-Sea Malta employees (particularly those who signed up to the Atlantica deal) are given the chance to work for Grimaldi’s new shipping line. While nobody can impose anything on Mr Grimaldi, it would be fair of him to demonstrate some loyalty, at least to those who expressed the desire to work for his company – they deserve to celebrate Christmas. We also encourage the GWU to take a step back and go back to their drawing board!
Edward P. Fenech is the spokesperson on Finance, the Economy and Tourism for Alternattiva Demokratika – The Green Party