Honest George Pullicino

We admired the candidness and frankness with which George Pullicino, Minister of Rural Affairs and the Environment, admitted to Malta's past mistakes on waste disposal. In a rare sortie in The Times, he also spared readers a lot of useless recrimination of who was to blame for this sorry state of affairs. Let the people make up their own minds on this and decide whom to blame for it.

What Mr Pullicino wrote and which deserves amplification is that without EU membership the task of ridding ourselves of the environmental mess will have been next to impossible.

He reminded people that for decades they had not paid anything for waste disposal and hence the mess. But if now they are rightly complaining about the dirt they themselves have created and wish to clean to improve their quality of life, they must somehow pay for the clean-up. Hence the eco-contribution.

Fine. So long as the job is done well, no one minds. Mr Pullicino also reminded readers that various projects related to waste manage-ment infrastructure were going to cost €32 million, of which the EU was going to fork out €24 million or 75 per cent.

The minister concluded his piece by reiterating that the Government intends to halt and eventually reverse the damage that has been inflicted on our eco-system.

The European Movement (Malta) encourages national unity on this issue. This is not a task which will benefit the government but ordinary Maltese citizens.

It is not a task which will be completed within the span of this legislature but something which will have to be pursued further in the next and the one after that. So it is in everyone's interest that a national consensus be created.

We must not be myopic to the facts either. Much as the burdens of the eco-contribution need to be stressed, the longer-term advantages must not be lost sight of.

We refer to the improved health of our citizens, the change in consumption patterns, the attractive- ness of our isles to tourism and the savings and increased incomes that these measures generate.

All we need to ask is: will we be better or worse off if these measures succeed?