Hot on the heels of the news that there will now be a market inserted between the theatre and parliament house (the world's first market in a project designed by Renzo Piano) we have another Taghna Lkoll blockbuster. Six million euros - and with budget over-runs, a whole lot more than that - are going to be spent on building a depot where grown men without wit, humour or style can spend the entire year building the dreadful carnival floats that are paraded on one day a year, to almost nobody's interest in the 21st century.
This is clearly another of Joseph Muscat's pre-electoral pledges, this time to the builders of carnival floats who think they are entitled to have their boring and pointless hobby bankrolled by the general public. I look back and remember all that fuss Anglu Farrugia - now Speaker of the House - made in the aftermath of the 2008 general election, accusing the Nationalist Party of buying votes and going to the Police Commissioner with a thick file he claimed contained evidence of many hundreds of votes bought, and I think how sickening all of this is. This, Mr Speaker, is how votes are bought: not by using party funds to literally buy a person's voting document as you stupidly claimed (which translates into taking the vote out of the system, not buying it), but by abusively making promises, before you get into government, that you can keep only by using public money to give people what they are not entitled to have.
So now the public is going to pay so that those who build carnival floats don't have to buy or rent their own warehouses. The public, who have been told that there is not enough money to complete Renzo Piano's Valletta plans with a beautiful garden in the ditch for public use, have now been summarily informed (without being consulted) that €6 million of their money will be going to house the hobby of a bunch of bazuzli. As though the pledges to bird-shooters, bird-trappers and market stallholders are not enough, we now have this.
But there's more. The carnival-float depot will also include a rehearsal space for bands and a theatre for the performing arts, we are told. A quick look at the plans shown on the video given to the press, and it is immediately obvious that this was a bit of an afterthought when Willie Mangion failed to come up with his garage. Not that they really wanted him to find a garage. They just wanted to give him a sinecure in return for appearing on their Taghna Lkoll billboards and Switching For Joseph, and they need to justify it with the public who are paying for it. The public have not swallowed that justification at all.
So what you have in those plans is something inspired by repeat viewings of the History Channel's Storage Wars, where rival teams go to bid for the unknown contents of abandoned rented lock-up stores. You have two rows of single-storey steel-shuttered lock-ups, each one with a large number on it, that look as though they might also be a great location for the next series of Waking The Dead, with somebody gruesomely murdered in a storage depot in the middle of an industrial area at night. And then, at the end of these two rows of steel-shuttered warehouses, you see - as incongruously as an emu in Leo Brincat's office - a Greek theatre. I howled with laughter. The Greeks built their theatres, like their temples, always with a view to the landscape which served as a natural, dramatic backdrop and put the building in context. But our Taghna Lkoll Greek theatre looks like it has been dropped from Doctor Who's Tardis into the latest location for Storage Wars.
It is no coincidence that the Minister for Culture (and Justice) who approved these plans for a carnival depot is the very same who told us yesterday that the plans for market stalls in the Renzo Piano project have his wholehearted approval. Perhaps he would also care to tell us, now, that he is voting for the killing of birds in the mating season to continue? That would really be the limit. The plans for this depot, alone, have cost the public €80,000 already, and that's on top of the €40,000 that Willie Mangion has been paid already, for nothing, given that this project was in the pipeline all along. But those who think that Mangion's sinecure will now be terminated, saving the public €20,000 a year that can be spent on something more useful, like high teas for the President in Leicester or coffee in the Music Room at Villa Francia for the Spouse of the Prime Minister's entourage of lackeys, are going to be disappointed. Owen Bonnici has informed us already that his man Mangion is going to be kept on the state payroll - as a 'technical adviser' for the Storage Wars depot. Yes, that's right - he's got all kinds of training and certification and even experience in... singing in hotel lobbies and restaurants.
All together now: Malta Taghna Lkoll.