The world was a better place when Konrad Mizzi occupied himself populating secret accounts with his assets. One of the unintended consequences of the Panama Papers matter is that he has been foisted on us as Minister for Tourism. My guess is that we’re about to realise how much safer we all were when he was kept distracted by his 92 euros.
It’s a guess informed by what Mizzi said in Parliament last week. He spoke of public-private partnerships that would see new beaches developed in Sliema and Pembroke, among other places. Malta needed new ‘attractions’ that would boost tourist arrivals and duration of stay. These could include food festivals and niche music events. The drift is that the country will have more things in more places for more tourists to enjoy.
Fairly standard fare at face value, except there are at least three things about it that cause major indigestion.
The first is the business of public-private beaches. The hyphen disguises a lop-sided transaction in which stretches of public shore would effectively be handed over to private individuals.
Now there is nothing new about this. It was done in the 1960s and later with beach concessions, a number of which survive. None of them are terribly public. For example, the substantial part of Golden Bay that is a beach concession is out of bounds to people who are not guests at the hotel.
The objection is that different arrangements are possible that would not bar people from using beaches. True enough, but then again there are no public-private arrangements that do not promise some kind of profit to developers. At the very least, private operators would be all over the beaches offering services. For a definition of the word ‘offering’ in this context, I would invite readers to try to place a towel and a beach umbrella at the Blue Lagoon.
Mizzi’s, then, is nothing but a proposal to effectively privatise the shore and populate the beaches with his friends’ assets. It is also one that will rob us, the public, of the few relatively quiet spots that we have left.
Tourism is a sector to which models of limitless growth can only be applied at great cost
The second thing that is wrong about his grand plans is the fixation with theme parks, events, attractions and such. I get the impression that Malta is increasingly becoming a kind of giant amusement park in which locals use every minute of their time and every inch of their soil to perform for paying visitors.
Now that is by no means an endemic trait, as readers familiar with the notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ will be aware. Still, there’s only so much of it one can stomach. At this rate we will soon resemble the Congolese villages set up by Leopold II at Tervuren in 1897. (That’s not a compliment, by the way.)
Mizzi, and the many others who reason like him, seem to assume that the natural state of humans, and especially tourists, is chronic boredom, and that the only way to overcome it is through amusement of some sort, no matter how inane. This is the reasoning behind Popeye Village and the daft ‘fun trains’, among other heart-stopping attractions.
Now I can see why a place like Dubai might find it necessary to build indoor ski resorts, if only as a measure to save tourists from the existential nausea of the Tartar desert. Anywhere else, however, it’s tremendously refreshing to visit places where people just get on with their daily lives and refrain from trying to keep tourists distracted and entertained at all times.
Mizzi’s Malta is a Disneyland that thinks nothing of systematically destroying village cores, countryside and much else, as long as tourists can be made to look the other way at contrived attractions, re-enactments, fakelore and endless clones of food festivals.
There’s a third thing. It turns out that the Panama account was Mizzi at his most restrained. In that case, he was happy to live by the maxim that less is more – thus the €92. Unfortunately he has now replaced it with the belief that nothing succeeds like excess.
Mizzi wants ‘aggressive marketing’ that would bring more and more tourists to Malta. Problem is, tourism is a sector to which models of limitless growth can only be applied at great cost. Mizzi might wish to look up the word ‘sustainable’ in the dictionary.
The number of tourists who visit Malta stands at upward of two million annually. While it is certainly a good thing that the country has pulling power, it doesn’t make sense for us to push for higher numbers.
There are places in Malta where it is practically impossible to catch a bus. Someone told me the other day that she waited for two hours at a bus stop in St Paul’s Bay. All of the many buses that drove past were packed full of tourists, and there was no way she was getting anywhere. Had she hired a car, as many tourists do, she would simply have added to the traffic chaos.
The point is so obvious that it seems to be worth making. Tourism puts a great strain on resources and infrastructure. And while some of that is the affordable cost of an industry that sustains our economy, too much of it will ruin our standard of living. Anyone who has any sense will know that the point of saturation has been reached and passed.
For all his talk of progressive thinking, Minister Mizzi seems to be stuck with the formula of crowds of tourists packed on the fun train to Popeye beach. So much déjà vu, I suppose, except the consequences have started to hurt.
mafalzon@hotmail.com