Karmenu Vella calls those years of the Labour government, when Lorry Sant, Joe Grima, Patrick Holland, Danny Cremona, Wistin Abela, Alex Sceberras Trigona and he himself ran riot, the 'Golden Years of Labour'. The land-grab was full-on back then, with the country controlled by robber-barons, development run amok, rampant violations of human rights, thugs beating people up with the help of the police and corruption embedded into the system every step from the bottom up - or the top down. Oh, and no water in the taps, food on the supermarket shelves or clothes on the rails. And everybody had to wear Abanderado underpants, whether they wanted to or not.
Market restrictions can't be revisited now that we're in the European Union, human rights violations are a little tricky, thugs and the police beating people up are a non-starter, but the land-grab and assaults on the environment are back. The Labour Party, which under Joseph Muscat says that it is 'business friendly', has always been madly attractive to speculators and this seems to be the only kind of business they mean when they speak about business. Labour politicians themselves tend to come from a social culture where the acquisition of more and more land and its development is associated with status, security and riches. To be brutally frank, it is the only thing they understand, locked as they still are in the mindset of feudal Sicily.
Over the last few weeks, it has seemed to people that their environment is being assaulted on several fronts, and that the government has deliberately opened up all these fronts simultaneously so as to confuse and exhaust The Enemy. Ironically, the enemy is the electorate, which might otherwise inconveniently sabotage or handicap the government's plans to dole out pre-electoral dues in the form of mega-projects, like the University of Baksheesh at Zonqor Point, the cruise liner terminal and yacht marina which are merely the cardboard box in which some mega-real-estate development, including a hotel and many flats, is packaged, and projects which are not huge in themselves, but which will have a severely negative impact on the immediate surroundings and the people who live there, like the shooting range planned for the open countryside behind the Jesuits' retreat home in Mosta. Who are those Russians anyway, and is the shooting range a money-laundering operation? These are legitimate questions that should be addressed.
The government is doing this because, in the couple of years after the first flush of a massive electoral victory, it thinks it can get away with it. That is exactly why all these shocking things - apparently corrupt projects, abusive appointments, wholesale cronyism, loading people onto the public payroll - have been packed into 24 months. The idea is to leave us reeling and overwhelmed, too shocked and taken aback to breathe or to fully grasp what is happening, but then with enough time to get over it before the next general election.
Does Joseph Muscat care if he haemorrhages 20,000 votes? No, because the way he sees it, he has 36,000 to play with. That is why he is facing the news cameras not with an expression of concern for public outrage but with a smirk that is offensive and sarcastic more than it is nervous. "I can't understand what all the fuss is about," he said to reporters who confronted him with questions about the real estate compound eyesore planned for the Gozo coast. What sort of way is that to speak to the electorate who voted him in to power and to whom he is accountable? People have every right to make a fuss and he has a duty to address their concerns. But Muscat seems to come from the Maltese Labour school of thought on democracy which decrees that people get their chance to have their say and make a decision once every five years, and in between they should shut up and let their representatives decide for them as though they are minors at law.
Yes, Muscat is right - the Labour Party had a cruise liner terminal and yacht marina scheduled for Gozo in its 2013 electoral manifesto, but it did not say anything about these two being conjoined and also buttressed by massive real estate development including a hotel and many flats, plus a huge concrete esplanade that is so hideous that, quite frankly, words fail me. If they want super-yachts and the super-rich, that's not the way to get them. Formentera is a favourite destination for the Mediterranean's most glamorous yachts and the island is practically in its natural state. You won't see a concrete esplanade anywhere. If they want concrete esplanades, they'll go to Cannes, with which Gozo can never hope to compete. Anywhere else has got to be natural. How many glamorous people are spending time at the Grand Harbour marina or Portomaso? Their yachts might stop there, but they don't. Even the ghastly Mutassim Gaddafi no longer does so, since he was shot dead.
This is not about the yachts. This is about building and selling all those flats. And we have more than enough of those already. The trouble with Malta is that those who made their money by building and speculating don't know how to diversify, move on, and put their money into something else, growing another sort of business entirely. Some of them end up financing drug deals and others just use their money to buy more land and try to get permits to build more stuff on it so that they can sell it to make more money to buy more land to build more flats and sell those too. But there are limits, and Spain should have served as a severe lesson. If Malta's real estate developers had the education and the intelligence to invest their profits in something different, Malta would be better all round, and their own prospects would be healthier.
But instead they bankroll the Labour Party and go after permits in return, maximising their land-grab opportunities and turning Malta into an increasingly ugly island that reflects their personal taste perfectly. Sandro Chetcuti would go to Rocco Forte's resort near Sciacca in Sicily and think him stupid for not massing concrete 'fletsijiet' on the foreshore. Poor Malta - run by people with execrable taste, who make choices to match. And I'm not only talking about these politicians here, but about those who put them in government. I'm happy to have voted for the government that gave us Renzo Piano's magnificent parliament house, while many of those with a superiority complex about these matters now have to confront the fact that they voted for the government which is set to give us the University of Baksheesh on agricultural land from which farmers have been evicted, and a hideous canker of a cruise liner terminal on the Gozo coast, plus all of that Sandro Chetcuti's avaricious schemes for making more land out of the sea because they don't have enough to build on. Way to go, chaps. Taghna Lkoll.
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