Proportionate response

This week, Labour's general conference will be discussing and finalising our plan to reposition and upgrade tourism in this country. We need to do this as a priority measure and as a proportionate response to the dilemmas of economic stagnation that we have lived with for too long. At a time when all sectors of the economy seem to be faltering (including real estate, if you want to believe this, which I still do not want to), it has long been obvious that to claw back into growth we must concentrate on that sector or sectors which are most likely to respond quickly and positively to encouragement of one sort or another.

Along with other areas of economic activity, tourism has been allowed to stay for too long in the doldrums. Sluggish to negative growth rates it experienced in recent years were airbrushed away by the authorities, eager as they always are to promote feel good at all costs. The situation demands that every stop be pulled to run a new strategy for tourism to recover. Instead we have wasted the past few years in listening to turgid propaganda about how things would be improving and in trying to solve a hopeless organisational tangle at the national tourism authority, which spent millions of liri in hopeless marketing of the Maltese product.

Meanwhile, other tourism destinations attained growth rates that far outstrip our performance. So it is not a bleak situation that prevails across the board. To the contrary.

It is useless trying to solve all the problems we face at the same time and to try and give the impression, as the Gonzi administration does, that such an approach is working. Reports and surveys paid for with good money are being flushed out by the dozen. They list scores of recommendations many of which hardly cohere with each other. Even when they do cohere, there are so many of them, and they are laid out in such a disjointed fashion, that quite clearly nothing to almost nothing will happen about them. This is not the way to restructure. Not the way to set about creating new jobs, in tourism or wherever.

With its plan for renewal in tourism, Labour is mapping the way forward. Masterminded by my friend and colleague Evarist Bartolo, the proposals before Labour's general conference constitute a reasonable and realistic plan to get things moving. They have been prepared on the basis of extensive consultations with most people, enterprises and associations involved in the tourism sector, both here and abroad. As happened in 1996-1998, Labour is well on its way to show how a difference for the better can be made in tourism, by setting up an adaptable national policy that is geared to our constraints and attractions... in today's world.

So according to some editorial writers, columnists and lobbyists, it was wrong political practice plus bad taste to hold a press conference just in front of the Mediterranean Conference Centre, to press for an independent administrative inquiry on the party held there on New Year's Eve. A young woman died. A magisterial inquiry is being carried out. But this will not go into the administrative and decision making implications of how the party was set up and organised.

The Gonzi administration expects all of us to accept the say-so of the Commissioner of Police and of the Home Affairs Minister. Both of them consider that things remained under control.

Obviously some important interests are involved. When the story broke, it was clear that some media were being sourced with briefings from people, influential and in the know, who wanted to stamp into the public mind their version of what went on. Meanwhile, officially, the argument was maintained by those sourcing these briefings that one had to wait till the magisterial inquiry was terminated before one could comment. The tactics were so blatant that only a blinkered media would play game.

Now they tell us that it is offensive for the Opposition to push for a further inquiry on the matter. Truly proportionate responses to matters that are of vital public interest in this country can, it appears, quickly become deviated by people with connections and influence. Since I have been in Parliament, I have seen cases of importance being swept under the carpet, just because well connected people here and there felt threatened. Even if they were involved in no criminal or administrative hanky panky, letting those cases be investigated seemed, from their perspective, to puncture their standing. So, there was the case of a death at the police depot that was buried, despite our insistent pleas for an independent inquiry. There were numerous cases of mismanagement or worse that were pooh-poohed and somehow or other stonewalled into oblivion, like with the recruitment for the Auxiliary Workers Scheme, the Chambrai "deal" and construction tenders for the Tal-Qroqq hospital.

The latter involved possible scams or million liri fudges with contracts, to put it mildly. The MCC tragedy is of another order of happenings. It needs to be explained. And the people involved in the case should not be allowed to give their explanations and have us accept them unchecked. A young woman lost her life. We need to ask why and how. There has to be a proportionate response to the questions raised.

This is not asking for the impossible or for the politically partisan. During the 1996-1998 period, the Labour administration ordered an administrative inquiry into the death of a soldier at the Gozo barracks and into an aborted hijack of an Air Malta plane. We learned a lot from those inquiries and took remedial action.

That the Gonzi administration refuses to do the same now over the MCC tragedy is worrying. That a concerted media barrage has been mounted against the idea of having a serious administrative inquiry into the case is even more so.