The organisers of the drifting competition that was meant to take place at Montekristo Estates are the latest victims of Labour’s destructive populist policies.
Only a few days ago, it was the hunters who realised they’d been duped. The fracas hunters made in the countryside in the weeks following Labour’s stunning electoral victory last year was indicative of what Labour had led the hunters to believe – under Labour it’s a free for all.
The problem was that Labour had promised the exact opposite to others.
The growing public outrage at the bird shooting, brought to light by brave bird lovers, who get arrested for saving birds, questioned by the police and, more recently, beaten up in Buskett, has shaken the government. It is a middle class outrage and that rattles Prime Minister Joseph Muscat because he knows how unreliable that voter base is. Labour is not its natural home. Muscat now vows to eradicate illegal hunting.
The act Labour in government is trying to pull is impossible to sustain because it is based on populism, promising everything to everyone, no matter how contradictory it may be.
Labour appeals to the heart and not to the mind, to the individual and not the common good
Labour is an interim government.
The international drifting competition organisers, FM Promotions, must be feeling fooled. They were led to believe there would be no problem with the venue, Montekristo Estates, because only a few months ago a huge fair was held there and inaugurated by the President.
Two government entities, the Malta Sports Council and the Malta Tourism Authority, came forward and sponsored their event. The Sports Parliamentary Secretary attended the launch of the competition. What better government endorsement could they have asked for?
According to FM Promotions, the planning authority initially had no objection when the police consulted it on whether to issue a licence for the event. Then, at the eleventh hour, Mepa came up with a list of conditions before it could give its approval.
They included the payment of €100,000 outstanding debts, the closure of the illegal zoo and the demolition of illegal structures at Montekristo Estates.
Motor Sports Federation president Tonio Cini claimed that motor sports enthusiasts were being used as guinea pigs by Mepa to get at Montekristo Estates owner Charles Polidano.
He wouldn’t have said that had he listened carefully to what a well-briefed Prime Minister had to say about the matter.
According to Muscat, Mepa is independent. Of course it is and that’s why it can change its mind so fast. Had Mepa given its go-ahead, Muscat went on, “you would have been the first” to ask why it had not objected. He was addressing a Times of Malta reporter.
Muscat said that, unlike in the case of the big trade fair, the police this time round sought the advice of Mepa and they did this “even after the articles you had carried”.
That doesn’t sound like Mepa getting at Polidano. It sounds like a Prime Minister afraid of another media-led Montekristo controversy, a monster that keeps raising its head ever since that botched attempt by Mepa to pull down those illegal structures.
This was a damage-limitation exercise by a government that acts on impulse, obsessed by its image, or better, by the illusion it is trying to perpetuate, that it is in control. Without clear policies and principles, you cannot be in control. You cannot govern through spin alone. Spin only wins you elections.
The Montekristo debacle is what happens when there is a government without a moral compass, a government that throws decency to the wind, as it basks in populism. None of this would have happened if the government had a clear policy on illegal development. People would have known where they stand and car enthusiasts would not have been left high and dry, embarrassed beyond belief in front of the international participants.
But that is Labour for you and there is more to come because this way of government is untenable.
Nationalist Party leader Simon Busuttil appears to be very aware of the pitfalls of trying to please everyone. He made a curious observation, and admission, at a conference on Malta’s experience since its accession to EU. He asked whether too many concessions were given to hunters at the time of Malta’s debate on membership.
At that time, he recalled, the PN government was under great pressure to get everyone on board with membership, in spite of Labour’s anti-EU stand, which Muscat then wholly supported. The result, Busuttil said, was the spring derogation from the EU Birds Directive.
Well, we can come round to forgiving the PN for doing that, considering the wider good and the stakes that were involved.
But the concessions promised by Labour prior to the election to the various interest groups are nothing compared, and the purpose of those concessions was not EU membership but power. Trying to reverse this corruption of Malta’s political culture will not be easy because Labour appeals to the heart and not to the mind, to the individual and not the common good.
Busuttil laid the groundwork for his party at the independence celebrations speech when he said: “We deserve a liberal society… we have the right to a clean environment, to independent public institutions and to a society which allows each and everyone of us to develop our full potential.” This is where the battle lines of the future shall be drawn.
Labour has successfully pampered to those liberal elements of society disillusioned by the PN’s stand on divorce. Yet, Labour is anything but liberal, it’s power-centred and socialist to the bone.
The fundamental values upon which liberalism is built, civil and human rights unencumbered by State control, rest perfectly well alongside true conservatism but don’t make good bedfellows with what passes for a Labour Party in Malta.
If we are to avoid another ransacking of this country by Labour, to please interest groups that vote it into power for egoistic gain, then, yes, we shall need to work for a society where everyone can develop his full potential without the State, and not in spite of it. That can only be achieved if we roll back the State, most especially in its current reincarnation under Labour. We need to strengthen those institutions that are there to protect us from the State, not act as a government by proxy.
That would involve a culture change of enormous proportions, a breakaway from the colonial, subservient thinking we should have abandoned 50 years ago with independence but are still very much infested by today.
Labour thrives on patronage; it institutionalises it and sees it as its only means to continue to secure power for itself and its cronies. Old Labour Manwel Cuschieri explained that policy very clearly in his weekly column on l-orizzont recently when he took umbrage at the chief of staff at the Interior Ministry, Silvio Scerri.
Cuschieri wrote he was regularly receiving complaints from people (for which read Labour hardcore) that Scerri was not doing “justice” with them. Could it be, he asked, that Scerri is always right and the people who go to him always wrong? People, he said, “deserve respect, maximum attention and prompt service”.
People who truly uphold liberal and conservative values do not go to the likes of Scerri to obtain “justice”. They go to the department or the public entity concerned and request what is theirs by right. Anyone who goes ‘higher’, in my eyes, is dubious in intent.
Labour plans to stay in power through a combination of Cuschieri’s “prompt service” and contradictory and populist policy statements that left the organisers of the drifter competition in such a mess last weekend.
The PN will have to offer the exact opposite of that: a political platform that puts the common good first and which strengthens individual rights and liberties so people reach their full potential without having to cower before the ‘customer care’ officers that today contaminate government ministries.
Whether people are prepared to step up to the plate and grow up or will instead remain with a nanny State that treats them like fools is hard to say.