First we celebrated the first 100 days of the new Labour administration. Then the first three months. Now some have remembered it is now six months into this new administration. And, as the Italians say, some knots are getting stuck in the comb (I nodi vengono al pettine).
Over the space of less than a week we have had two U-turns by the government, despite anything the government might say to mask this.
Last Thursday we learned that after an entire campaign by Labour claiming, falsely, that the use of fuel for the power station extension is dangerous for public health and that the BWSC plant is a ‘cancer and asthma factory’, this same administration has bare-facedly applied to extend the lifetime of this same BWSC plant and its usage of heavy fuel oil at least until next year.
On Monday we learned that after closing the newly-inaugurated Marsascala park built as a sort of compensation for the waste treatment plant, the San Antnin facility, the government has now declared it intends to reopen the park which had already become a welcome attraction to parents and children from that area.
Maybe we would have had yet another U-turn, this time regarding the bendy-buses, had not Minister Mizzi stood his ground and ordered the suspension to remain.
In a way, it is perhaps inevitable that some or many of the promises made in an election campaign are dropped by the wayside when the cold blast of reason and practicality hit the hot air of so many campaign promises. Time and again, this proves the validity of not making campaign promises that cannot be kept.
In this case, the Labour Party unleashed its atomic barrage against the BWSC first by implying massive corruption in the choice of the plant and then by hyping the effects of using HFO for combustion when it knew very well that the older Delimara boilers were also using HFO and when HFO is regularly used all over the world without this attempt at mass hysteria. We all remember a particular Xarabank edition in the middle of the campaign when there was much gnashing of teeth and sob stories as regards cancer prevalence in the area.
The BWSC plant was finally commissioned last December and the results of the first months of operation are available on the Enemalta website and show that at no point was the level of danger remotely reached.
As regards the Marsascala park, had there really been noxious fumes, the government should have closed the plant, rather than the park. Whether the decision to close up the park stemmed from concerns about bad or shoddy work or from a certain vindictive approach to anything done by the previous government is still to be seen.
It would rather seem that the government was swayed by the petitions that were being circulated and which reportedly collected some signatures of Labour-leaning citizens.
As a result, the government now has egg on its face and the Nationalist Opposition is on a roll. With the prime minister being away for this and the coming week (China this week and the UK next week), one is left to wonder who is minding the store.