After Prime Minister Robert Abela said a few weeks ago that the mass transport system is still on the Government's agenda and quoted new studies, his Finance Minister not only contradicted him but practically told us that such a system would be madness, Nationalist MP Toni Bezzina said.
The government's right hand writes one thing while the other hand wipes everything off the page, he said in a statement issued through the PN.
Now, after Clyde Caruana's budget on Monday included no allocation whatsoever, not even a cent, for a study or any kind of new mass transport system, during a debate on the national broadcaster with Shadow Minister for Finance Adrian Delia, the Finance Minister came up with something new: he told us that the solution to traffic is more fines.
This Government does not believe that people are capable of choosing the best transport alternative, if they actually had one. It believes that punishment is needed for those who use their car, for a mass transport system to work.
Clyde Caruana is now also giving a strong certificate of failure to the Minister responsible for traffic, Chris Bonett, Bezzina said.
This has happened while the government has still not implemented a single one of the measures that Chris Bonett announced to supposedly reduce car use. And the only disincentive people have not to use their car remains the fact that everyone is stuck in traffic. It is now more than evident that the Minister for Finance is twisting Robert Abela's arm not to invest in a system that could actually solve the problem.
Every time he speaks on the subject, he confirms that no one in government has a clear solution to this issue. This apart from the fact that we still don't know which is the Government's official position on the matter - whether it's Robert Abela's or Clyde Caruana's.What we know for certain is that the Government has given up on solving the problems it created itself.
This budget has shown us that as long as Labour is in Government, people will remain stuck in traffic, the PN said.