The man’s just asking for it. With an Opposition asking for his resignation, he has now laid down the gauntlet: According to The Sunday Times he has declared that if the vote is carried, he will resign. With a government member (Franco Debono) already stating he may abstain, and with other MPs who are normally considered as ‘rebels’ not declaring their voting intentions, although one can only guess, the man has a death wish.
One may of course see things in many different ways: Last Saturday’s press conference which announced a complete reversal of the Arriva template, reverting back to the Valletta-centric system, now called the spoke system, acknowledging the policy decisions behind the new Arriva template were wrong and ‘too advanced’ for Malta, and acknowledging these as mistakes or political responsibilities was Dr Gatt’s ham-fisted way of saying “sorry” and perhaps averting the inevitable.
Let us widen this a bit: What is the government’s present and future interest? Dr Gatt is already on his way out. He has declared he will not contest the next elections. Any politician doing that is already the past – ask Tony Blair. More: Dr Gatt’s outburst at the Independence celebrations that PN can govern for 20 more years, much as he now tries to circumscribe it, has done some damage to the party, as witness the billboards showing Dr Gatt and Dr Gonzi with ’20 more years?’. That of course can be subverted if Dr Gatt is no longer there.
It may be premature to write off Austin Gatt or to declare he has outlived his political usefulness. It may also be somewhat premature to try and establish his place in Malta’s contemporary political history. He had a signal period as secretary general of the party, identifiable by his Ġakketta Blu brigade in the 1976 election and his promotion of so many young people to posts inside the party and the government.
When he made the grade to a minister, he was a rather middling minister of justice (perhaps no one can really succeed there) but then he embraced innovation as minister for IT and later for transport. His campaign for more innovation and IT consciousness should have been better supported by a sceptic Civil Service.
He then became involved with the SmartCity Malta project which may have been very good in its day but which has since suffered, like everybody else, from the Dubai crisis and the international crisis. This has now boomeranged and all the past boasting on the part of the government compared to today’s meagre results provokes widespread derision. Again, one could be premature in declaring the project a failure when it is just in its second year.
Where then Dr Gatt became a cropper was in the reform of public transport. The media, our stable included, have been emphatically negative on Arriva’s first months, and rightly so. However, there is also another side to things. People in their criticism are already forgetting how really bad the previous system was. Whatever one says about the new system not keeping to its times, the buses are comfortable and a good ride. They are easy on the elderly and we are now seeing more mothers with babies and buggies travelling by bus where this was previously a huge problem. There is also a different patronage already: The buses today are being used by a vastly different clientele than the riff-raff which predominated in the ATP era. It is no longer relegated to the really poor.
Dr Gatt now says that the Arriva people are sending back their British officials (who are indirectly being blamed for the hiccups of the system) and handing over to the Maltese. We wait to see whether this will be an improvement or not.
Dr Gatt is arrogant, rumbustious, sometimes needlessly confrontational but he commands uncommon respect and loyalty from his team. Without him in the ministerial team, the Gonzi government will be seriously depleted, which is perhaps what the Opposition is after. Now it is being helped by none other than the man himself.