As the furore over the case of the three hospitals continued to develop, one thing still surprised me. I heard no comment about how Maltese hospitals seem to attract foreign "hornets" who seek to benefit in ugly ways from this island's public funds, paid for by the Maltese taxpayer. Indeed, today's scenario is hardly the first one in recent history.
One which was just as serious happened during the 1990's. It concerned the launch of the project which is known today as the Mater Dei Hospital. It was meant to be a hospital overseen by the San Raffaele outfit in Milan which was run by a priest called don Verze. His state of holiness was underwritten by major Maltese personalities, including the Prime Minister of those years.
From beginning to end, the project was a total non-starter. I just had one meeting with this priest and immediately understood he was a person one could not trust. The Nationalist government of those days believed the contrary. Rampant corruption and falsifications proceeded about the project. But nobody seems to remember this. Some of those who preach in condemnation of today's scandal were then supporters of - if not participants in - yesterday's.
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THE ESTABLISHMENT
Use of the word "establishment" has declined in current political discourse, perhaps because it is now considered to have a lesser impact in the day to day controversial tit-for-tats. However let's not conclude from this that the word does not really refer to a reality which still exists in our society and has always been with us.
There do exist established (mostly informal) groups of individuals who with the personal links they have inherited or cultivated share the same views, perspectives and interests. They experience these links as "natural", even automatic. Which in the major areas of national decision making motivates them to pull at the same rope-from justice, to moral and social backing, economic management and naturally politics. In this, there is no need for some statute.
It is easy to declare the establishment does not exist. However, the mistake is to ignore its existence.
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PLAN
In Malta we still ridicule the idea of some extensive economic and social plan that sets national targets. So instead, we either insist that in the circumstances which prevail the world over, there is no valid basis for the setting out of plans; or we deliver and then ignore vague plans in various sectors that are rarely cohereent with each other.
Not so in China. They still believe in plans even if not of the sort they produced in the past, when the framework was that of the state (or the political organization running the state) imperatively taking all decisions.
Their latest plan, voted last month by the Chinese Communist Party central committee for the country, which now has the second largest economy of the globalised world, is impressive. It makes sense to study it in detail The fact that China is run politically by a governance system that is not ours and must not be ours, does not mean that the Chinese plan is not worthy of study.