Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s silence on the lack of jobs created at SmartCity pointed to a “Prime Minister held hostage” by Transport Minister Austin Gatt, Opposition leader Joseph Muscat said yesterday.
“The Smart City issue will not go away,” Dr Muscat told his audience in Mġarr. Several young people had believed the government’s 2008 claims that SmartCity would create more than 5,000 jobs and had picked a career accordingly, he said.
Now that it had been revealed that nowhere near that amount of jobs was being created, “nobody wants to assume responsibility,” Dr Muscat said.
Some weeks ago, The Times revealed that the SmartCity project was not meeting its job creation targets. The IT Ministry subsequently argued that SmartCity was still not be bound by its contractual obligations due to the government not having dismantled the Wied Għammieq sewage pumping station, as it had agreed to do, among others.
Dr Muscat yesterday said he had “serious doubts” as to whether this was the real reason behind SmartCity’s lack of jobs, but if this was the case action should have been taken about it.
“I cannot understand how the Prime Minister can remain silent on this issue.”
The Opposition leader had further criticism for Minister Gatt, saying that the upcoming changes to the bus routes were going to undo the one positive – mainly environmentally-friendly buses – that the new system had brought about.
As part of the route upheaval, Arriva will be adding a further 36 buses to its fleet. A number of these buses will only meet Euro III or Euro IV emissions standards, as opposed to the Euro V standards met by the majority of the fleet.
In a reply, the Transport Ministry said that the additional buses were being brought to Malta as an urgent stop-gap solution. Arriva was still contractually bound to ensure its entire bus fleet met Euro V emissions standards by May 2012, it said.
Dr Muscat listed the money that had been spent so far in reforming public transport. To the reform cost of €57 million, he added the €6 million subsidy Arriva would be receiving from the government, the €830,000 spent on creating a route interchange system that had “failed”, €400,000 in consultancy fees for routes and €80,000 on a 30-minute launch ceremony.
The result of all of this, Dr Muscat said, was 65,000 complaints so far and a government that “seems happy to waste money”.
It was with all this in mind, he said, that the PL had moved a motion of no confidence in the Transport Minister. Dr Gatt will face the parliamentary vote this coming Friday and has indicated that he will resign if the motion is passed.
Turning to the recent news by international credit rating agencies about Malta, Dr Muscat said the reports of all these agencies had said that Maltese government debt had increased disproportionally, Dr Muscat said.
Dr Muscat did not refer specifically to the latest reports of Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, which both maintained Malta’s top tier rating, after a downgrade by Moody’s last month. He said all three agencies had flagged Malta’s problem with its debt.
He said the Prime Minister was “not technically competent to lead the nation’s economy”, emphasising that the government had allowed the debt to “spiral out of control”. The country was forking out €550,000 every day in order to service its debt interest, he added.