Announced on the eve of a batch of local council elections the Smart City project caught all opposition off balance. To criticize the promise of 5000 new jobs would have been politically suicidal. Once the opposition had sidestepped the initial assault, it had no choice but to acquiesce in all that followed. It rode the bandwagon on Smart City in an attempt to share in Minister Gatt’s aura of innovation and futuristic vision. The construction industry which finances both parties in parliament would not have it any other way.
What have I to criticize about Smart City? Nothing in particular except that it is a real estate deal disguised as a technological renaissance. The five thousand jobs made to seem as though they were all already feeding families are a guesstimate over the next decade and there is no guarantee that they will fall to anybody Maltese if and when they become available.
Far be it from me to be against Smart City or any other such project. I just want them to be sold with less hype and for our government not to make nonsense of our laws to make them happen. The 2006 Local Plans for the area explicitly stated that there were no rules governing the area and that each project would be considered separately. The plan was no planning.
Having succeeded with Smart City, Minister Gatt must have convinced himself that he had found the holy grail of government without rules. If the timing is right and enough energy is committed, a Minister can become a sultan. He probably regrets the Prime Minister’s U-turn on the Xaghra l-Hamra golf course. There should be villas and greens now where a national park has come into being.
The charge of the light brigade over electricity tariffs is well known to us all. With industry to the right of him and unions to the left, Minister Gatt pointlessly charged the canons of common sense, humiliated regulators and consultative bodies to take the country into such a crisis that unions spoke with one voice probably for the first time in history. The greatest casualty of all was our government’s reliability with foreign investors. We have become unpredictable.
His latest project is a road from nowhere to nowhere at great expense and at horrendous damage. No, not to the environment. Who ever worried about damage to the environment? In this Minister Gatt turns ecologist. He is proposing the new motorway in Mellieha because he cares so profoundly for the sand dunes.
No, the damage was done as he swept past in his cavalcade through decency and common courtesy. In response to concerns expressed by the Mellieha Holiday Complex he is reported to have quipped that if the operators don’t like the idea of his road running past the most secluded part of their Danish Village, they can sell out at any time. Had Minister Gatt been a common or garden ignoramus it would not have done much harm. Unfortunately he is a Minister of the Government of Malta.
None of us has any business to expect any Dane or indeed any foreigner to make any distinction between politicians of any colour in this matter. Dr Gatt simply becomes Malta, you and I, as the resounding insult reaches the ears of its remote victims. The developers and operators of this complex have the unique merit of having taken over a devastated barrack complex and turned it into Malta’s best landscaped touristic development.
By operating it as a holiday venue for union members they have been able to maintain a constant flow of visitors from a country otherwise far removed from us through good seasons and bad and very, very bad and for several decades. Telling them that they can jigger off just because Minster Gatt wants his road to go through is outrageous.
Only political prejudice and ideological blindness has kept us from seeking to have a dozen Danish Villages. All over Europe but particularly in the North, unions and pensioner associations, invest in similar operations in the warmer south. Two Danish Villages in Gozo would break the back of the seasonality monster which leaves many Gozitans without a job in winter. Such projects give stability through recession and financial turmoil without the spectacle of high rises and vast glass walls. They are our softspoken support especially when things become tough.
Minister Gatt should not apologise for his unforgiveable arrogance. He should resign. He has shown himself to be worse than unpredictable. He is a menace to economic security and at a time when caution and prudence are mandatory. Never mind the road. Never mind the electricity rates. His methods and his manners are an extravagance we cannot afford.
Thursday 27 November 2008
Friday 14 November 2008
The maggots at work
The customary budget ritual is in full swing. Bombast by the Minister of Finance, followed by denouncements of irresponsibility by the Leader of the Opposition and then a barrage of scorn by the Prime Minister. In an atmosphere of the deaf shouting at the deaf, I feel not in the least inclined to discuss it.
What is the point of making even the most constructive criticism if at the outset it is clear that the government will decide everything alone, smacking down every critic and never giving credit to those who make valuable contributions even as they are plagiarized? Having humiliated the MCESD over the hike in energy tariffs, the government is rushing ahead with its plan as though it ruled the country only for the most rabid of its partisans.
For those who were persuaded that Greens in government would have been a threat to stability and (long ugly word) governability, this is a moment when they could feel justified. Greens could not participate in a government like this. Their presence would have made this behaviour impossible. By keeping them out of parliament and out of office, voters have secured the perpetuation of Mintoffian style government sometimes by the PN and sometimes by the MLP.
Chances are that a significant segment of the electorate likes it this way. Still in the Dark Ages of democratic development, they perceive Dr Austin Gatt’s swashbuckling exploits as spot on. Not everybody.
Some of us voted for EU membership precisely to end this nonsense. The vast, if shallow and rapid, stakeholder consultation exercise in the EU accession process whetted our appetite for inclusive government. It was a first experience of the wealth of possible contributions ordinary citizens could make of their professional and sectoral experience and expertise.
Since 2003 it has been one long betrayal of all such hopes. To participate in MEUSAC or MCESD has become complicity in sustaining a façade of consultation while the pre-EU membership sultanate ruled untrammeled. In 2008 the last shreds of justification on the basis of better-a-façade-than-nothing-at-all have all been blown clean away.
The government has provoked the unimaginable: first a joint statement criticizing the government by all civil society bodies and now an all-union demonstration. The unions’ principal demand is authentic consultation. Ironically what is essentially a conservative part of society in so far as it has an interest in resisting change in the interest of its membership, is currently the principal driving force seeking the attainment of the EU Dream method and style of government.
In smashing all the mirrors and tearing down all the veils, Minister Gatt has revealed our political reality in all its awesome ugliness. With far less spectacle, Minister Fenech has helped him along in an aside in which he revealed that the Malta Resources Authority was deliberately left on the sidelines twiddling its thumbs on the issue of electricity tariff revolution. Our most crucial regulators can be disabled at the flick of a political switch. In Strasbourg MEP Simon Busuttil has been active in a venetian blinds exercise over the Ramla Bay petition to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament. Another regulator has fallen victim to political expedience, in this case: MEPA.
In its fifth term since 1987, the PN in government is displaying all the symptoms of fear and insecurity of a minority government too long in office. It seeks total control. Exclusion has become its hallmark, advisory institutions are mocked and regulators disabled. Overhabituation with being the government has shorn it of all the profoundly democratic values gained in its years in exile in the 1980s. The post 1987 years of reconciliation are long gone. The wisdom which suppressed retaliation and sought to bridge the unbridgeable divide in its first term, is lost.
This government through its acolytes and apologists is banking on a propaganda campaign unearthing the horrors of the 1980s to smear the brand new Leader of the Opposition. Nothing better to rely on? No insight to the jarring anachronism? Which PN guru has determined that the party’s last salvation lies in scaremongering and exclusion at the cost of its avowed democratic and European values?
The final cruel irony is that the MLP’s failure to seek EU membership left it to the PN to achieve it and now the PN is in a far better position to eat the heart out of the values EU membership should represent from the inside. The hopes of better quality politics in mutual respect and widespread participation allowing a careful consideration of the issues with full information at hand are all but dead. The PN has smothered those hopes in their infancy. It may take generations before we can entertain them again.
Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party
http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/
What is the point of making even the most constructive criticism if at the outset it is clear that the government will decide everything alone, smacking down every critic and never giving credit to those who make valuable contributions even as they are plagiarized? Having humiliated the MCESD over the hike in energy tariffs, the government is rushing ahead with its plan as though it ruled the country only for the most rabid of its partisans.
For those who were persuaded that Greens in government would have been a threat to stability and (long ugly word) governability, this is a moment when they could feel justified. Greens could not participate in a government like this. Their presence would have made this behaviour impossible. By keeping them out of parliament and out of office, voters have secured the perpetuation of Mintoffian style government sometimes by the PN and sometimes by the MLP.
Chances are that a significant segment of the electorate likes it this way. Still in the Dark Ages of democratic development, they perceive Dr Austin Gatt’s swashbuckling exploits as spot on. Not everybody.
Some of us voted for EU membership precisely to end this nonsense. The vast, if shallow and rapid, stakeholder consultation exercise in the EU accession process whetted our appetite for inclusive government. It was a first experience of the wealth of possible contributions ordinary citizens could make of their professional and sectoral experience and expertise.
Since 2003 it has been one long betrayal of all such hopes. To participate in MEUSAC or MCESD has become complicity in sustaining a façade of consultation while the pre-EU membership sultanate ruled untrammeled. In 2008 the last shreds of justification on the basis of better-a-façade-than-nothing-at-all have all been blown clean away.
The government has provoked the unimaginable: first a joint statement criticizing the government by all civil society bodies and now an all-union demonstration. The unions’ principal demand is authentic consultation. Ironically what is essentially a conservative part of society in so far as it has an interest in resisting change in the interest of its membership, is currently the principal driving force seeking the attainment of the EU Dream method and style of government.
In smashing all the mirrors and tearing down all the veils, Minister Gatt has revealed our political reality in all its awesome ugliness. With far less spectacle, Minister Fenech has helped him along in an aside in which he revealed that the Malta Resources Authority was deliberately left on the sidelines twiddling its thumbs on the issue of electricity tariff revolution. Our most crucial regulators can be disabled at the flick of a political switch. In Strasbourg MEP Simon Busuttil has been active in a venetian blinds exercise over the Ramla Bay petition to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament. Another regulator has fallen victim to political expedience, in this case: MEPA.
In its fifth term since 1987, the PN in government is displaying all the symptoms of fear and insecurity of a minority government too long in office. It seeks total control. Exclusion has become its hallmark, advisory institutions are mocked and regulators disabled. Overhabituation with being the government has shorn it of all the profoundly democratic values gained in its years in exile in the 1980s. The post 1987 years of reconciliation are long gone. The wisdom which suppressed retaliation and sought to bridge the unbridgeable divide in its first term, is lost.
This government through its acolytes and apologists is banking on a propaganda campaign unearthing the horrors of the 1980s to smear the brand new Leader of the Opposition. Nothing better to rely on? No insight to the jarring anachronism? Which PN guru has determined that the party’s last salvation lies in scaremongering and exclusion at the cost of its avowed democratic and European values?
The final cruel irony is that the MLP’s failure to seek EU membership left it to the PN to achieve it and now the PN is in a far better position to eat the heart out of the values EU membership should represent from the inside. The hopes of better quality politics in mutual respect and widespread participation allowing a careful consideration of the issues with full information at hand are all but dead. The PN has smothered those hopes in their infancy. It may take generations before we can entertain them again.
Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party
http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/
Friday 7 November 2008
Improbable hope
Barack Obama brings hope to the United States and to the world at a time when gloom and uncertainty seem to be taking over. The infectious euphoria of his victory is a mild inebriation we should all allow ourselves to enjoy, a welcome break in the clouds of gloom that still promise us tough times ahead.
Perhaps Barack Obama’s greatest burden is just that: not to disappoint us all. Black America and much more is overjoyed but Obama inherits an economy $480 trillion in debt and facing the world’s worst financial crisis for generations. To what extent can he change the lot of the underprivileged in the US?
Can he pull the US out of Iraq without provoking disaster across the Middle East? Can he bring Russia back to fruitful dialogue mode? How will his presidency affect the range of allies, puppets and opportunist friends collated by the US in the Bush era? The UK and Kazakhstan? Have we heard the last of Axes of Evil and Rogue States?
Will he be able to take the US from major cause of climate change per head to principal solution and crucial driving force? His potential for benign change in Africa is immense? Will he use it? Will he walk the talk or rely on his unquestionable showmanship to make us all believe that he has done much when effectively little or nothing is changed?
America is dreaming again and that is already heartening but it will take more than talk to keep it going. We have every reason to expect a New Deal from Obama. He is being touted as the Messiah who will put an end to the era which started with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House. Can he pull that one off? Or will he seem to have made a change while preserving and indeed consolidating the fundamentals? We all live in hope even when we can agree that it is an improbable hope.
A new team and a different political culture, suppressed and denied for almost a decade, now takes up positions of decision-making. These are the people who will be calling the shots, the new incumbents. Will they set out the new rules of the game or will the lobbyists hold them down to the old ones? Who does call the shots, Barack Obama, his entourage or those who hold the purse strings? How much room to manoeuvre does a US president really have?
Will Barack Obama want to change the system that brought him to power? Closing down Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Patriot Act will earn him easy kudos from liberals but will he even dream of addressing the ludicrous electoral systems which exclude all minority parties from representation in Congress? If he is trapped in the cliché of the US being the cradle of democracy, he may never acknowledge that an infancy extended from 1787 to the present day may be a little too long.
Having become the darling of the free press, will he have any interest in revisiting its failure to function in the wake of 9/11? This bulwark of democracy, this fourth estate, evaporated as President Bush went to War on Terror. How free is the free press? What access does it allow minorities? Who owns it? Will Barack Obama dare to ask?
Eliminating the threat of an extension of the Bush/Reagan era through a McCain/Palin victory has been an achievement which earns Obama gratitude worldwide. Ironically it may serve to obscure the fact that the US is the basic resource of all those who want to reduce politics to bi-polar confrontation, a minority political culture among developed democracies but a growing and menacing trend in Italy and Poland as in Malta and Albania. Relief at getting rid of George W. Bush and his aliases may make us forget about the system that produces them.
A black US president, with family in Kenya and a Muslim education in Indonesia is himself a beacon of hope for tolerance and dialogue in a very troubled world. He becomes a disappointment once he rules over the “Best democracy money can buy” without acknowledging the dissonance.
Barack Obama already has his hands full dealing with a full agenda of massive challenges. He may be forgiven for directing his energies at these first and leaving the root issues for later. Still, it would be a severe disappointment if a president so well endowed to change America keeps himself too busy to take a shot at it. The time is right and he is the best man for it. There could be no better way to tell the rest of us that he truly means business. For him to be effective, to exorcise the Bush era, he must persuade the world that a post-Obama US will still bear his mark. That may be the greatest challenge of all.
http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/
Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party
Perhaps Barack Obama’s greatest burden is just that: not to disappoint us all. Black America and much more is overjoyed but Obama inherits an economy $480 trillion in debt and facing the world’s worst financial crisis for generations. To what extent can he change the lot of the underprivileged in the US?
Can he pull the US out of Iraq without provoking disaster across the Middle East? Can he bring Russia back to fruitful dialogue mode? How will his presidency affect the range of allies, puppets and opportunist friends collated by the US in the Bush era? The UK and Kazakhstan? Have we heard the last of Axes of Evil and Rogue States?
Will he be able to take the US from major cause of climate change per head to principal solution and crucial driving force? His potential for benign change in Africa is immense? Will he use it? Will he walk the talk or rely on his unquestionable showmanship to make us all believe that he has done much when effectively little or nothing is changed?
America is dreaming again and that is already heartening but it will take more than talk to keep it going. We have every reason to expect a New Deal from Obama. He is being touted as the Messiah who will put an end to the era which started with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House. Can he pull that one off? Or will he seem to have made a change while preserving and indeed consolidating the fundamentals? We all live in hope even when we can agree that it is an improbable hope.
A new team and a different political culture, suppressed and denied for almost a decade, now takes up positions of decision-making. These are the people who will be calling the shots, the new incumbents. Will they set out the new rules of the game or will the lobbyists hold them down to the old ones? Who does call the shots, Barack Obama, his entourage or those who hold the purse strings? How much room to manoeuvre does a US president really have?
Will Barack Obama want to change the system that brought him to power? Closing down Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Patriot Act will earn him easy kudos from liberals but will he even dream of addressing the ludicrous electoral systems which exclude all minority parties from representation in Congress? If he is trapped in the cliché of the US being the cradle of democracy, he may never acknowledge that an infancy extended from 1787 to the present day may be a little too long.
Having become the darling of the free press, will he have any interest in revisiting its failure to function in the wake of 9/11? This bulwark of democracy, this fourth estate, evaporated as President Bush went to War on Terror. How free is the free press? What access does it allow minorities? Who owns it? Will Barack Obama dare to ask?
Eliminating the threat of an extension of the Bush/Reagan era through a McCain/Palin victory has been an achievement which earns Obama gratitude worldwide. Ironically it may serve to obscure the fact that the US is the basic resource of all those who want to reduce politics to bi-polar confrontation, a minority political culture among developed democracies but a growing and menacing trend in Italy and Poland as in Malta and Albania. Relief at getting rid of George W. Bush and his aliases may make us forget about the system that produces them.
A black US president, with family in Kenya and a Muslim education in Indonesia is himself a beacon of hope for tolerance and dialogue in a very troubled world. He becomes a disappointment once he rules over the “Best democracy money can buy” without acknowledging the dissonance.
Barack Obama already has his hands full dealing with a full agenda of massive challenges. He may be forgiven for directing his energies at these first and leaving the root issues for later. Still, it would be a severe disappointment if a president so well endowed to change America keeps himself too busy to take a shot at it. The time is right and he is the best man for it. There could be no better way to tell the rest of us that he truly means business. For him to be effective, to exorcise the Bush era, he must persuade the world that a post-Obama US will still bear his mark. That may be the greatest challenge of all.
http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/
Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party
Saturday 1 November 2008
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