Labour leader Joseph Muscat this morning blamed the government's lack of investment for the power outage on Tuesday.

Speaking at a political conference in Gozo, Dr Muscat said the governemnt was warned in a report commissioned by Enemalta three years ago, that unless urgent investment was made, capacity would not be enough to meet demand by the summer of 2009.

While the government was now trying to imply that the outage was an act of god, the real reason was the lack of investment, Dr Muscat said.

It led one to suspect , he said, that one of the reasons why the power tariffs had been increased was to discourage demand, while also paying for Enemalta's inefficiency.

Dr Muscat referred to criticism he had faced when he said (on timesofmalta.com) that he could not guarantee tariffs under the next Labour government. What he could say for certain, Dr Muscat said, was that in the context of current oil prices, tariffs would certainly have been much lower.

Furthermore, rather than looking four years into the future, could the government guarantee that the power tariffs would not be raised any further this year?

Dr Muscat said Malta had a government which was doing nothing in the face a growing economic crisis, stubbornly insisting that the measures announced in the budget last October were sufficient. Businesses were closing down, tourism was seeing the worst numbers for years, and the government was taking no remedial action other than postponing the 50c tourist tax by a few months. The least the government could have done was to remove plans for this tax completely.

Tourism operators were wondering if the government knew what the situation really was. Decisions were not being taken, or being taken late and wrongly. Nothing had been done to reduce costs, of which the heaviest burden were the utility rates.

It was shameful, that in these times of recession, inflation was highest in Malta than anywhere else in the EU. This week the government launched a campaign to encourage people to eat more fruit and veg. But could the people afford them? After the utilities, fresh food was one of the components of inflation that was rising fast and inexplicably, when producers were earning less. This was also something the governemnt should be acting upon.

At the beginning of his speech Dr Muscat expressed solidarity with PL media executive Charlon Gouder . He hoped, Dr Muscat said, that the assault on Mr Gouder had nothing to do with politics and that Malta would never revert to a situation where might was right. Dr Muscat appealed for calm and said all issues should be resolved with reason. For Labour, he said, violence could ever be justified.

Dr Muscat also condemned threats being made against people who had said they voted Labour on June 6, including cases where, he said, people had been told they did not need to apply for government contracts any more. Public funds were not PN money and everyone had a right to express his views without suffering threats, Dr Muscat said.