There really is no mystery behind the Nationalist Party’s adamant and, for many people, incomprehensible reaction to the Labour government’s Individual Investor Programme (IIP) initiative.
One may assume it is the same old PN still throwing post-election tantrums, or, also understandably, a nostalgic throwback to the time when PN-inspired anti-foreign-investment forays into the dark, timeworn corridors of international diplomacy were launched, sometimes to “good” effect, at others not exactly that, as many German entrepreneurs had then shown by investing heavily in Malta despite the scaremongering and related horror stories.
There has also been the popular interpretation, not so phantasmagorical after all, that an exasperated, hardly changed PN leadership seems bent on punishing the electorate for having been so brutal and efficient in condemning it to the Opposition benches. The level of arrogance and the decadent nature of the previous administration had been so high, they are still somehow filtering into the veins of the new (sic) party hierarchy.
But in truth there can be only one reason, and it is both political and logical. The real reason for the PN’s ire on the issue is the innovative nature of the IIP programme which, for them, threatens to “enrich” the nation and, in so doing, giving Labour the financial muscle they intentionally denied it when eventually conscious of the fact most people had had enough of their hypocritical style of government.
I bet if Malta were to strike oil, as some predict it will one day, the present PN leadership would not come out applauding Mother Nature’s belated gift to these otherwise barren islands, and, rather, they would promptly ask what would happen when the oil stops gushing out.
The obvious bitterness behind the PN’s campaign against the IIP programme can only be understood in this logical way. They thought Labour would find problems trying to cope with the country’s finances, their having left them in shambles as international agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s invariably confirmed on various occasions. Instead, to their horror they have had to stand and watch Labour bringing the deficit down to less than three per cent of the GDP without it having to present an austerity budget for 2014.
The same shock was in store only after a few months of the new administration when new jobs, full time and part time, exceeded all expectations and new local and foreign investments were already showing a marked increase.
Even worse for the Nationalists, the energy farce perpetrated by the comic duo of Austin Gatt and Tonio Fenech has, since the March general election, been stopped and a new gas-fuelled power station is to replace the highly controversial, heavy-fuel-oil-burning furnace the nation had been lumbered with amid the screams and suspicions of foul play, corruption and multi-million side commissions the story about which is still unfolding.
The immediate result is that within just a few more weeks, people will be paying reduced energy bills. That must be very frustrating for Simon Busuttil et al and, certainly, why several of his cohorts are now making themselves look so horribly pathetic at public consultancy meetings and other official gatherings where experts, those very same experts trusted by the previous administration, are dishing out the details.
It goes on and on, of course. The Arriva fracas, for example, has been seen to by Minister Joe Mizzi in such an efficient and practical manner as to win him the admiration of one and all. True, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and one still has to see what the new public transport contractor will provide, but we have already seen how things should have been done in the first place.
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Back to the future
It was good to watch the Maltese government and the Vatican amicably signing an additional agreement to give back the State what a former Prime Minister and President had surrendered, for obvious political gains in the form of Church-owned lands in exchange for the Church’s tribunal supremacy over the Civil Court, way back in 1993. Forget all those sanctified delusions and mistaken notions of that time.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was spot on when he declared at Zebbug that the situation created by the 1993 deal was not acceptable in a European country. While I agree with him that the new agreement is “not a matter of petty defiance”, I guess Eddie Fenech Adami, the so-called father of EU Malta who had authored the 1993 concordat, did not think we had to be that European when it came to the utter necessity of a separation between Church and State.
The new agreement not only rights the wrong of the previous agreement, but in a way it also puts us back to the future. State supremacy on such matters was established in 1975 when a Labour government had introduced, against vehement Nationalist and local Church opposition, the right to civil marriage. At that time, non-EU Malta had been thoroughly European.
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Thank you, Pete Seeger
Baby Boomers all over the world, including many of us in Malta, were saddened by the passing away of American folk singer Pete Seeger, a mentor to Bob Dylan and a civil rights activist who was one of the chief guiding lights and father figure of the sixties’ social and cultural revolution. Not that with time he had lost any of his fighting spirit. At well over 90 years of age, in October 2011 Seeger was still marching in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests when he declared: “Be wary of great leaders. Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”
Author and co-author of such popular songs as If I had a Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn and Where have all the flowers gone, Seeger was an iconic figure in popular folk music. His left-wing politics, however, got him blacklisted in the intolerant, red-under-every-bed America of the 1950s when he was, as a result, kept off commercial television for more than a decade.
It is not a lesson Americans seem to have taken to heart. For Pete Seeger today read Edward Snowden. Snowden may not have carried a guitar and given us a song, but he has woven out a no less strong condemnation of the brutal and illicit ways of the one and only super power.
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A strong message
There can be no stronger social message than the Green Paper presented at the Millennium Chapel last Wednesday. Entitled “A Framework for Poverty Reduction and for Social Inclusion 2014-2024”, it is worth every single genuine word of attention it is given.
Malta has her 21st century poor, a different poor to those of the post-World War II years when clothes, food and a home were the immediate necessities, but poor still. Single parents, families of the unemployed, senior citizens and disabled persons whose income puts them at risk of poverty.
The Ministry for the Family and Social Solidarity’s Green Paper takes a detailed and open-minded approach to the whole problem. It is, no doubt, a solemn beginning that projected its first flashes of hope in this year’s budget. A lot more still needs to be done, of course, but it looks like the determination to do it is there.