It appears that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s magic hat is truly bottomless. Nearly every week now he pulls out a white rabbit or two to keep us entertained and panting for more – or so he thinks.
The prospect of yet another mega project negotiated by Labour actually just gives everyone the jitters. This country always seems to end up with the short end of the stick in deals Labour reaches behind closed doors. It is already bad enough that we have to pay for whatever Labour promised lobby groups with fat wallets before the election but the international deals are just getting creepier and scarier.
Muscat, so obsessed with things mega on this tiny island, would have been much better off in a South American republic, where he could treat the country like a fiefdom and his subjects as idiots, throwing them morsels while he rubs shoulders with whom he perceives as powerful.
Labour wants us to believe that, with them in government, the proverbial pie only gets bigger.
With so many rabbits coming out of Muscat’s hat, we may be excused for thinking we are at a permanent fenkata orgy or at an eternal Labour banquet in the sky.
It sounds eschatological. Muscat is after all a cheap copy of his predecessor, Dom Mintoff, once dubbed Is-Salvatur because he always took the country to the brink… until one day it just toppled.
The biggest problem with Labour is that, just two years in government, its record on international deals is atrocious.
Everything is veiled in secrecy, raising suspicion and fear that the worst (and not the best, as Muscat likes to boast) is yet to come. It was the same with Mintoff – things only got worse, never better.
The sale of Maltese passports was a sign of things to come. Only a party that still thinks like our pirate forefathers would ever embrace such a scheme and come to a secret agreement with an international company that calls in our Prime Minister at will whenever it organises a sales pitch.
We are selling European Union passports that do not belong to us. Everything about the citizenship scheme is false.
It does not bring investment but shame and a list of false addresses by new anonymous Maltese who would never dream of living here.
Next came Labour’s power station project. The target date came and went but Muscat and his crew who put their necks on the line are still there because they never really meant it: it was just another white rabbit to win the election. That also was false.
The sale of Enemalta too was a scam. This so-called biggest foreign investment ever, marketed as a Mintoffian-style coup where the Chinese government was duped into buying our bankrupt power station, has turned out not to be such a bad deal for the Chinese at all. There were huge land transfers to Enemalta before the Chinese came in, all of which were kept secret. Talk about selling the family jewels.
We could skip over the other Chinese investments promised but which never materialised, like the breakwater at Marsamxett Harbour, the bridge or tunnel across the fliegu and, yes, was there not a monorail in the offing? It gets so confusing when you look back at Muscat’s incredible statements.
Labour is turning this country back into a colony because of Muscat’s obsession with mega projects that he mistakes for progress
The Energy Minister’s wife, Sai Mizzi, never needed a contact address in Shanghai because no real businessman there is interested in Malta. The Enemalta deal is a strategic investment by the communist Chinese government in the smallest and weakest country in the EU.
Slowly, this country is being re-colonised, only this time it is not by a democratic country that had some sense of decency. Muscat had campaigned against EU membership because he did not think Malta could compete on the international market. That is why he opts for one-on-one dealing, for secret deals that he then unleashes upon the country in a fake triumphalism that leaves everyone stunned.
Mintoff ran the country exactly that way. We never knew what to expect each morning.
Muscat likes to impress but he always comes across as a schoolyard bully. Only someone with such a mindset would call off the hunting season via a tweet while in Azerbaijan. And it had to be from Azerbaijan, of course, that undemocratic country with whom we made a fuel hedging deal that left us all looking like suckers.
Muscat’s foreign policy is a return to colonialism because this so-called foreign investment he boasts of is coming at an enormous price.
During the local council elections campaign, Muscat announced a €200 million investment in the health sector in Gozo.
It turned out not to be an investment at all but simply the provision of land where Barts University can set up shop for its own purposes. Meanwhile, the Gozitans can look forward to renting flats for students and, yes, providing room and laundry services.
The same will apply to the mega-project in the ‘south’, consisting of a huge university. The government will provide the land to an American university that will effectively operate like a foreign base for Middle East students. Yes, we’ll do their laundry and sell the students beer, if they’re liberal enough to drink it.
Malta had a similar mindset back in the 1960s when it sought to attract rich English retirees to settle here. Except then, it was still emerging from colonialism.
When Muscat initially brought out the white rabbits of an American university and a nature park, there appeared to be no connection between the two.
But when it emerged that the university will be located in Marsascala, exactly where Labour’s self-proclaimed king of the south, Silvio Parnis, promoted a mega hotel project only a few months ago, things began to make sense.
The government said the (stunning) 100,000-square-metre project will be built on abandoned agricultural land. That is doublespeak for ‘outside the development zone’. It would be interesting to know who else owns land over there and if they had any connection with former Labour nightmare Lorry Sant, God bless his soul. As in the golden years of Labour, their property shall turn into real estate overnight.
Whatever Labour has in mind for its so-called ‘south’, it is clear that it will come at a heavy environmental price, which is why Muscat keeps connecting this mega project on virgin land with a nature park.
It was an offence to our intelligence that on Sunday Muscat said this monster project was not turning the island into a concrete jungle but constituted sustainable development. Did people actually vote for this man?
Labour is turning this country back into a colony because of Muscat’s obsession with mega projects that he mistakes for progress. True, these foreign bases here will boost our economic statistics but the economic benefit will not seep down to the working class, where Labour’s voter base lies. Most of the jobs created will probably be for cleaning women.
Muscat’s white rabbits are a sale of our country’s best assets – land – the very assets Mintoff so dramatically wrenched off the hands of the British Empire when it was in its twilight.
It is ironic that these latest colonial announcements from Muscat came as the General Workers’ Union unveiled a monument in Paola to commemorate former members that landed in jail after standing up to the “arrogance of the British imperial government” in 1958.
Muscat’s mega world of fantasy will keep the GWU busy for years to come in its battle against precarious work.
Mintoff would not have been amused had he been here today to see his beloved worker once again reduced to the servitude of the ‘foreigner’, be it a Malta passport holder renting an empty flat at Tignè, a university professor at Marsascala or a Chinese communist director at Marsa.
This is not progress but rabid colonialism all over again.