Removing parliament to the site of the former Royal Opera House may be more appropriate than many people may think. Politics does provide us with endless entertainment. It has become an indigenous art form, a true cultural expression deserving the prominence of location as one enters our capital city.
Where else in the world would you expect to have our most prominent European politician, laying the ground for his European Parliament election campaign on the amazing discovery that Malta is dusty.
With their featherdusters in hand, Dr Busuttil’s fans must have been utterly charmed by his dashing defence of air quality in the final months of his tenure as MEP. In the company of all interested stakeholders whether NGOs, construction lobbies and health experts he discovered that Malta had been shockingly lax in living up to EU accession expectations. The fan club must have tut tutted in unison.
He reported in Wednesday’s Times that the amount of dust in the air is 37 times the amount permitted under EU rules. He seemed horrified. My heart began to bleed when he noted the human cost: chronic respiratory illness, educational deficit, long term productivity effects. It is all true.
The thing is that it has all been true for as long as anybody can remember. Dust pollution in Malta did not come into being since we joined the EU nor has there been any need for new legislation to suppress it. The legislation was in place long before Dr Busuttil was born. What has always been missing has been the will to do something about it. EU membership has made it possible to document the situation and to quantify the pollution level, that’s all. The political will to act and enforce was and is still missing.
The superb theatre, the uniquely Maltese political genre of theatre, comes to light in the bold championing of outraged health and ecological values by none other than Simon Busuttil. Since we are not all batty old crows, we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Was this not the same Dr Busuttil who in 2004 performed the Berlusconian transformation from Head of MIC and honest broker in the EU accession process to PN star candidate in the EP elections? Is he not still the PN’s main foothold in the European Parliament?
His political birth in 2004 may be a rather recent affair but even he must have noticed that the PN have been in government with only the slightest interruption since 1987. EU rules or no EU rules the dust has billowed unimpeded for decades under his party’s rule. Every government for the past 50 years has had the power and authority to suppress the pollution and has failed miserably. In fact no attempt has ever been made.
For the past 21 years or so the Dr Busuttil’s PN government colleagues have had every opportunity to begin to do something about the familiar outrage. They have done absolutely nothing to address the issue. On the contrary they have actively promoted the causes of dust pollution and strenuously denied the evidence. Does anybody recall then Environment Minister, Dr Francis Zammit Dimech, announcing that the dust was brown not grey and that we had no cause for concern? I do.
Mabel Strickland’s White Dust Case in Lija dating from the 1960s remains an all time classic. The cause and the pollution are still there today. Dust from building sites clogs culverts all over the country causing havoc at the first rains and annual expenses in damage to waterlogged roads and clean-up operations. Every hardstone quarry in the country is visible from space because of the long white plume of dust covering vast areas downwind of each site determined by the prevailing westerlies. Check it out on GoogleEarth. Did we need Dr Busuttil to tell us that the situation is nothing short of bizarre? And of all people, Dr Busuttil, a major divinity in the pantheon of champions of the status quo?
Political U-turns are performed everywhere. In Malta we have developed the technique to be able to do S-bends as we have on the divorce issue where we are here, there and everywhere at once. More than this, we have exceeded all competition by achieving simultaneous two-way travel. Dr Busuttil is devastating the reputation of his own party while taking credit for salutary change and bagging it as a political advantage to the same political party. Now that’s entertainment.
Renzo Piano has once more been given the irresistible challenge of expressing all this: a show of leading edge democracy and delight in the wealth of diversity as members of the EU balanced against a reality in which what is essentially a one-party state generates and digests internal dissidence while ignoring all else. Can he perform as well as our politicians?
Where else in the world would you expect to have our most prominent European politician, laying the ground for his European Parliament election campaign on the amazing discovery that Malta is dusty.
With their featherdusters in hand, Dr Busuttil’s fans must have been utterly charmed by his dashing defence of air quality in the final months of his tenure as MEP. In the company of all interested stakeholders whether NGOs, construction lobbies and health experts he discovered that Malta had been shockingly lax in living up to EU accession expectations. The fan club must have tut tutted in unison.
He reported in Wednesday’s Times that the amount of dust in the air is 37 times the amount permitted under EU rules. He seemed horrified. My heart began to bleed when he noted the human cost: chronic respiratory illness, educational deficit, long term productivity effects. It is all true.
The thing is that it has all been true for as long as anybody can remember. Dust pollution in Malta did not come into being since we joined the EU nor has there been any need for new legislation to suppress it. The legislation was in place long before Dr Busuttil was born. What has always been missing has been the will to do something about it. EU membership has made it possible to document the situation and to quantify the pollution level, that’s all. The political will to act and enforce was and is still missing.
The superb theatre, the uniquely Maltese political genre of theatre, comes to light in the bold championing of outraged health and ecological values by none other than Simon Busuttil. Since we are not all batty old crows, we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Was this not the same Dr Busuttil who in 2004 performed the Berlusconian transformation from Head of MIC and honest broker in the EU accession process to PN star candidate in the EP elections? Is he not still the PN’s main foothold in the European Parliament?
His political birth in 2004 may be a rather recent affair but even he must have noticed that the PN have been in government with only the slightest interruption since 1987. EU rules or no EU rules the dust has billowed unimpeded for decades under his party’s rule. Every government for the past 50 years has had the power and authority to suppress the pollution and has failed miserably. In fact no attempt has ever been made.
For the past 21 years or so the Dr Busuttil’s PN government colleagues have had every opportunity to begin to do something about the familiar outrage. They have done absolutely nothing to address the issue. On the contrary they have actively promoted the causes of dust pollution and strenuously denied the evidence. Does anybody recall then Environment Minister, Dr Francis Zammit Dimech, announcing that the dust was brown not grey and that we had no cause for concern? I do.
Mabel Strickland’s White Dust Case in Lija dating from the 1960s remains an all time classic. The cause and the pollution are still there today. Dust from building sites clogs culverts all over the country causing havoc at the first rains and annual expenses in damage to waterlogged roads and clean-up operations. Every hardstone quarry in the country is visible from space because of the long white plume of dust covering vast areas downwind of each site determined by the prevailing westerlies. Check it out on GoogleEarth. Did we need Dr Busuttil to tell us that the situation is nothing short of bizarre? And of all people, Dr Busuttil, a major divinity in the pantheon of champions of the status quo?
Political U-turns are performed everywhere. In Malta we have developed the technique to be able to do S-bends as we have on the divorce issue where we are here, there and everywhere at once. More than this, we have exceeded all competition by achieving simultaneous two-way travel. Dr Busuttil is devastating the reputation of his own party while taking credit for salutary change and bagging it as a political advantage to the same political party. Now that’s entertainment.
Renzo Piano has once more been given the irresistible challenge of expressing all this: a show of leading edge democracy and delight in the wealth of diversity as members of the EU balanced against a reality in which what is essentially a one-party state generates and digests internal dissidence while ignoring all else. Can he perform as well as our politicians?
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