I suppose I shouldn’t, because it’s my country too, but I can’t help feeling a frisson of the old “I told you sos” when I spy the whiney FAA starting to whine to the (Labour) government that things are worse now than they were a few months ago.

I mean, precisely what did they expect to happen?

It’s not as if the writing wasn’t on the wall in enormous fluorescent letters, what with all that cozying up to contractors and broadly dropped hints about how Mepa would be ‘reformed’, which all of us with a nose for language know is code for ‘many extraordinary permits [will be] available’.

Well, FAA and fellow travellers, you who were so eager to see the back of the evil GonziPN, because, among other things, shock horror, an open-air performance space was going to be built, I hope you’re pleased with yourselves now. Yes, I know the smug ‘plague on both your houses’ crew, generally made up of people who live abroad and call Malta ‘the rock’, will say that politicians are all the same and it’s the two-party hegemony that brought all this onto your heads (they don’t say ‘our’, they don’t live here) but I tend towards the ‘devil you know’ theory, rather than the ‘devil who made it pretty obvious what’s coming’ one.

The PN could take a line on hunting

I’m not really following the Public Accounts Committee in great depth, it being the holiday season and all that (makes a change to see our honourables working in summer, though, doesn’t it?)

But I keep getting the impression that the National Audit Office didn’t do as thorough a job as we were given to understand when Labour were latching on to every tiny wisp of smoke that wafted up from the Enemalta report the NAO had produced.

“It wasn’t part of our remit” and “we didn’t extend beyond the years dot to dot” and “it wasn’t our job to find fire” (though inane remarks, back in the day, about smoke being spotted, were ok) and “we didn’t see any need to speak to the minister or to people who had left Enemalta” are cracks being repeated somewhat too often to inspire any great confidence in me that the NAO actually did anything but find that minutes were not kept properly. Being one of nature’s less than meticulous note-takers, I’m somewhat less than impressed with this finding, certainly less impressed than Labour’s honourable gents, who seem to think that it was a capital offence not to keep seconds, minutes and hours in copper-plate script.

But that’s appearing to become par for the course, from what I keep hearing.

Instead of concentrating on looking forward and making sure, for instance, that the new power station is on stream within however many months it was that young Konrad Mizzi promised it, the Government is busy commissioning inquiries, inquests, post mortems and fact-finding missions, not to mention investigations and inquisitions, desperate to find as many faults as it can with what went before, which will be handy for distracting us, the less than perfectly washed, when what should be coming doesn’t get here.

In the meantime, the PN, supposedly in Opposition, is taking something of a summer break, with the exception of a couple of its MPs, among whom Jason Azzopardi stands out.

It has been mentioned in other quarters but it bears mentioning again: it’s about time the PN took a stand on some things rather on the lines it took (or was made to take) when Joseph Muscat started messing about with theories such as migrants’ push back.

A line the PN could take, if I might be allowed to make a humble suggestion, is on hunting, which is a pursuit that should be well and truly consigned to the rubbish bin of history, once and for all. I know I’m being optimistic, so let’s start with baby steps and push back on the new ‘liberalisation’ of autumn hunting, received with such glee by the federation of oxymoronic hunters.

The EU is looking at us with a beady eye on this one and, coming after the poor showing our government made on immigration, there’s more than a small cloud on the horizon when it comes to our relations with the Union.

It is to the PN’s everlasting credit that it got us into the EU, in the face of Muscat’s valiant attempts to keep us out, and it would be scandalous if - even by inaction - the PN were to allow the anti-EU moves that are being made in deep background to gain even the slightest traction and present the (Malta) Labour Party with a platform tailor-made to appeal to its anti-EU, anti-foreigner support base.

What price data protection, environment protection, individual rights protection, any protection, then, huh?

We’ve enough evidence, if you bother to look at it, of the way the Labour Party, intoxicated as it is by its triumph at the polls, intends to act in government, and it is the PN’s duty not to go to sleep on the job and let them.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20