It appears that this Labour government is hell-bent on promoting and/or assisting the ultimate rape of Malta and has sold its soul to the construction industry.

The latest brain-twister by Joseph Muscat and his acolytes is the plunder of a large swathe of pristine land in the south and handing it over on a plate to an Arab construction group to execute a dubious project of erecting a misnomer university for the benefit of wealthy students of Arab and other nationalities.

It is also coincidental that in the middle of the chosen land is a tract of land belonging to certain people that raises the spectre of the Lorry Sant era. We have been told, however, that the government is going to be very firm with these people and will not offer them more than €500,000 of taxpayers’ money to acquire their land. How considerate of the government in dispersing taxpayers’ money. At least it is less than what was dispersed to acquire Café Premier.

We have been assured that this university will not be a white elephant and the Prime Minister has been reported to have said he is convinced that the Jordanian group will succeed in delivering the university. We have heard that before in respect of the new power station that should have been built by March 2015. But where is it?

It would seem there is a credibility gap somewhere and it is for the people of the south to figure it out. What they realise for sure is that the government is depriving them of a large swathe of pristine land and in an attempt to assuage their feelings of neglect, they are being offered a hypothetical national park, forgetting for the moment that this government had closed the beautiful family park opened by the previous Nationalist administration, only to reopen it and leave it in a state of neglect.

People have come to realise that ‘what glitters is not always gold’, whatever the Prime Minister says.