Roamer's column

The other day I unearthed a newspaper article from among a thousand or more I passed on to satisfy Wasteserv's voracious and insatiable appetite. It was the headline that caught my eye, a dramatic split infinitive no less: To boldly go, its author a minister known to bravely dare.

So where precisely was the government's Investments and IT minister, as he then was, going - so boldly? What secular Jerusalem did he have in sight? Austin Gatt was in transition mood mode, as were so many during the election campaign earlier this year. Any transition of the economy, he argued, had to include our harbour.

He was simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking: "How deserving our harbour is of its grand name." It was also "in need of a shake-up". Its military function "had long gone". There was not much hope of competing in the shipbuilding industry. "The macho glory days of the very big jobs on very big ships" were now behind us and, look, the harbour was in a state of degradation. To boldly transform was what we had to do.

And during the past decade, that started to happen. Where once stood, in a manner of speaking, so crumbled yet still elegant in its appearance, Pinto Wharf, there now sashays the nothing less than thriving Viset project, Valletta Waterfront. Across the harbour, the regeneration of the Cottonera Waterfront (Alfred Sant's watery, political grave in 1998) now competes with it, the old bakery a naval museum and a thriving yacht marina where previously there was zilch.

Alas, there is also a standing embarrassment in the shape of apartments in glass and steel. And as Dock 1 prepares itself for a facelift like there has never been, the Three Cities can now stare back with confidence, perhaps with a little insolence at the capital across the water.

Still, there he has already been, so where exactly was it that Gatt proclaimed himself so keen to boldly go? Well, the government has a grand plan. On completion we will be able to say, in truth, that we have a Grand Harbour to swank about.

Twenty projects costing well over €1 billion and generating more than 5,000 jobs are envisaged. There is a cruise liner terminal at Senglea waiting to be built, the promenade from Senglea to Ricasoli to be joined, the Marsa power station to be closed down, Rinella valley to be afforested, its bay to be expanded, Sir Paul Boffa hospital to be converted into a hotel, Villa Bighi to be restored, St Elmo to restore; in short a mouthful.

It is therefore pertinent to boldly ask: where have we arrived since September 2007? I suppose we must wait for Budget 2009 before we get anything approaching a proper answer; but what was promised by this summer has not, to the best of my knowledge, come to pass. Perhaps it is time for the minister to clearly explain.

44 years on

Those who have reached this age have never lived the colonial experience. Those who were born before 1958, the year Malta signed a Break with Britain Resolution, were probably marked by one of its by-products. For by the time a youngster reached the age of six, he was living in confrontational times. Most people were either staunch Nationalist or Mintoff supporters, belonged to splinters of both, or to the Constitutional party.

After 1964 three things happened which seared themselves into the national psyche: a Church-State rift reflected in the indomitable will of Archbishop Michael Gonzi and that of his arch-enemy Dom Mintoff, who wished to wrest the family from the Church (a phenomenon being repeated today by a different group of proponents); a leap in divisive politics that was to include violence turned on and off as Mintoff saw fit and which set party against party, family against family; neighbour against neighbour; and a battle between a political party moulded in Mintoff's image and another wedded to the image of Malta anchored geo-politically to Europe. The miracle is that we survived, not quite unscathed, but relatively intact.

Between 1964 and 1987 one political system wished to create an environment of State control that its opponents feared, with justification, threatened democracy itself. The other took on a 20-year long mission of persuasion to convince the electorate that Malta's place was in Europe, our democracy thereby further guaranteed. We turned the corner in 1987 under the dogged leadership of Eddie Fenech Adami.

Since then, apart from a 22-month interregnum, the Nationalist Party has been in power and whatever the number of hiccups along the way, we became members of the European Union - against extraordinary opposition from the Labour Party, including Joseph Muscat. It was a difficult slog. There was an entire mentality to overcome and a transformation to affect.

The island that was once a fortress broke down barriers once needed to keep the enemy out and let in a world where information technology and financial services, to name but two activities, have altered the physionomy of what is becoming a dynamic economy.

Where Mintoff saw the future in labour-intensive industry, regarded information technology as the devil incarnate (computers and the internet confined to the first and second circles of hell, colour television the colour of black and white) and the banking system an institution to be brought under the control of the State in addition to State-owned and doomed industries, Fenech Adami took the opposite view.

His government privatised - a bit like Sarah Palin's now famous drill-drill-drill - opened the market to information and communications technology, reopened the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, created a financial services sector that is now set to overtake the manufacturing sector in GDP terms by 2015 (unless things go one hell of a bump in the night during the next six months), set up a financial services authority (today the MFSA) that has a track record of which we can all be proud, and established an employment training agency where Mintoff could only come up with an Emergency Labour Corps. Malta is today a player in the global market.

All this and the next qualitative leaps we must take by 2015 - the regeneration of the Grand Harbour (see above), a further 20 projects to upgrade Marsamxett harbour and the scandalously endangered Fort St Elmo, the transformation of a derelict Ricasoli into a spanking new Smart City, a Dockland privatised and flourishing, were no doubt at the basis of last night's celebration of Malta's 44th anniversary of its independence - and at the centre of Lawrence Gonzi's speech on the Granaries.

A dizzy spell

An apocryphal story made the rounds in Wall Street in 1929. It started off as a cartoon. The market was in vertiginous mood, making greater paupers out of paupers who had decided to get on the bandwagon of a stock market that promised wealth and wealth everlasting.

The cartoon showed a man in bed reading his Wall Street Journal and being served his breakfast, silver service, in bed. He is reading the grim news - shares that had made him richer still, why, only last week, were even now on the verge of pauperising him. There had been cases of men following the plunging share prices literally by jumping out of their 12th-floor apartment. The butler has laid out breakfast. A voice behind the newspaper tells him: "James, if the market drops any lower you are to jump out of the window!"

There must have been many in that frame of mind but few butlers who obliged as the market took on a life of its own. It was Northern Rock multiplied by a thousand. In the US it was Lehman Brothers and no lifeline offered them as it had been to lucky Fannie, lucky Freddie, then ominously, so ominously, American International Group (AIG), a flagship so vital to international financial stability that the American government took it over. If AIG had gone, nobody was safe. And so on. Share prices went through the roof of many a stock exchange around the world.

There are those who insist that the market should have been allowed to sort itself out. Surely, that can only be true if the marketeers have not been behaving scandalously, which now seems to have been the case and why credit boom turned to credit crunch. The overstretched market took a pounding, but then so did many hundreds of thousands of human beings who borrowed as if there were no tomorrow and financial institutions who irresponsibly lent them as if tomorrow would never come. Pertinent to ask in the context of the carnage going on out there how over-borrowed we are, how over-lent our banks.

The Catholic Herald columnist Mary Kenny took up Rudyard Kipling's contention that throughout history mankind has had to learn the same lessons, individually and collectively, over and over again. The lessons basically followed the Ten Commandments and "as you sow, so shall you reap".

Where there is covetousness, lust, greed, pride and anger - the same old consequences of moral or social collapse will always follow. Every generation thinks they have found a way, Kipling had warned, of escaping from these immutable laws. But every generation eventually finds out that nothing is without cost, and excess will bring about retribution.