Guests and speakers at the MLP’s Business Breakfast last Tuesday were the victims of an organisational horror as the guests were invited, contrary to common practice, to queue for food while the speeches were going on.
Usually, the food is distributed either before or after the speeches.
As it was, Labour Deputy Leader, Charles Mangion, who read his speech, found himself competing against a wall of sound as people munched their way through breakfast.
By the time Dr Sant rose to speak, however, the noise had abated, possibly too because Dr Sant spoke without reading from his notes.
The breakfast’s title was “We Need a New Plan”, as if, some thought, a drastic change of plan was needed.
But when Dr Sant expounded further, it sounded more like the same old plan of 1996–1998, not that that plan did not have its good points. Once again, Dr Sant gave priority to tourism: six months should be enough to kickstart the tourism sector, he said, with partnerships with the private sector, as his government had done in Bugibba.
Malta must be rebranded, and so should Gozo. Malta as a whole must be embellished and the air of neglect such as one sees at Valletta must be removed and all Malta upgraded. Clearly, this is all acceptable, as to spend six years building the Cirkewwa and Mgarr terminals without completing the work is clearly unacceptable.
Industry came next on Dr Sant’s agenda and, once again, he focused more on improving on what we have rather than seeking new areas or ventures. Once again too, his criticism of Malta Enterprise looked like a carbon copy of his old attacks against MDC of previous years.
And when restructuring must be done, workers must have a guarantee their jobs are safe and they are trained, as this is not being done and the country has normally to pay for the re-use and deployment of redundant workers, such as happenened at the dockyards.
Dr Sant was certainly right when he committed his future government to streamline government and when he argued that the various layers of authorities, such as MEPA, MCA, etc. add confusion to the running of the country and detract from transparency.
The audience was a very mixed one: it included people who one may reasonably expect to feature in a Labour administration, and people normally thought of as friends of Labour, but it also included people from sectors not normally known to be Labour supporters.
GWU’s Tony Zarb laid down some markers: the union agrees with the need for a new plan but it first wants to see what’s in it and that workers do not suffer.
Ian de Cesare and George Schembri from MHRA tried to get Dr Sant to commit himself on low cost airlines but Dr Sant slipped out of that one.
He allowed himself however to say he is in favour of subsidising the Gozo helicopter service and to say that Malta needs a three to four per cent growth if it does not want to face social problems. He said nothing concrete about plans to widen education and training nor about addressing the social issues, although this was not, perhaps, within the remit of the breakfast.
Looking at the faces around, and speculating what was going on in the heads of some key persons, one could speculate that many did not agree that Dr Sant’s new plan will work (or as a former colleague said, the emptiness of his plans will be found out within three months of his election) but equally they were almost unanimously convinced of the inevitability of his win. The only people who seem to be worrying about this seem to be the people in the ministries, and even they are trying to find an escape route, it is said.