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Have you ever had one of those infernally busy days in which your lunch break gets pushed back by a few hours?
Bear with me for a second and use your imagination if you haven’t.
After a morning full of meetings which could have been an email thread, you stumble to the nearest food outlet at the earliest possible moment. Blinded by ravenous hunger, you pick the fastest, cheapest option. Your decision-making process gets hijacked by the immediate hunger you failed to satisfy.
By the time you’ve made it to the nearest display of ftiras and baguettes, you don’t care where the food is coming from, how it’s cooked, or whether it’s even fresh or not. As long as it fills the hunger hole, it works, to put it very crudely.
This type of response mechanism is an intrinsically human behaviour. It is the body urgently redistributing its priorities. It makes sense, after all: junk food is a quick boost of readily available energy when your body is exhausted.
Quick fixes can patch up a rough day when necessary. What they can’t do is fix a whole damn country.
Though the analogy is a bit too simplistic, it becomes scarily accurate if you apply it correctly.
The government is known for its tendency to nominally address issues whenever a crisis occurs. Not when it’s timely, or reasonable, or prudent to do so, but when action has to be taken. It is also indisputably wasteful with public resources, be it through incompetence or outright corruption. And when those resources are deployed to tackle a crisis, it is always more focused on PR damage control than it is on addressing the issue at hand.
It addresses crises in a manner that is strikingly similar to our hypothetical late lunch scenario, except in this bit, they’re not the ones going hungry – we are. While select individuals become ludicrously wealthy thanks to their friends in government, the rest of us get to watch as they steal everyone’s lunch money. They only respond when enough of us show up on their doorstep to demand our share.
The whole economy is subject to this objectionable brand of populism that deprives citizens of things they desperately need only to then pull them out of the hat at just the right moment.
On Sunday, prime minister Robert Abela felt it was his prerogative to inform us of how this year’s budget will ‘take Malta to the next level.’ In case you didn’t bother to click the second link in the previous sentence, note that Abela’s commentary came in the form of an opinion piece published on the Times of Malta’s front page.
Never mind the absurdity of the notion that the prime minister – an individual with the power to address the entire nation at any given time – wrote a Sunday column on the Times while also being one of the worst things to ever happen to press freedom in Malta. Let’s go straight to what he’s saying.
In essence, much of it is a repetition of the argument we’ve already addressed in a commentary piece we published last week. Plenty of self-praise for the ‘economic success story’ of the country, plenty of talk about Malta’s economic growth and how we must thank our supreme leader and his government for its stellar management of our country’s finances (apologies to the editor of The Maltese Herald for borrowing the tagline). We gave you tax cuts because we don’t even need to dip our hands into your income as much anymore, that’s how great we are. Viva l-Labour etc…
Hilariously, Robert Abela’s underwhelming foray into the commentary business was completely undercut by The Shift’s confirmation of the suspicions surrounding the Villa Rosa deal, a bombshell story published on the same exact day. While the prime minister patted himself on the back on the front page of the biggest newspaper in the country, The Shift put paid to any doubt that the government is bending over backwards to accommodate a major developer.
The way the government handles the public’s anger about its proven willingness to sacrifice public interest for private profit is always the same. They promised open green spaces in every major locality in the country in response to rising frustration about the country becoming a non-stop construction site. They stage public consultations whenever a major project like Villa Rosa threatens to swallow a whole neighbourhood, all to make people feel like they might actually have a reasonable shot at negotiating a compromise.
Abela’s puerile attempt at convincing you that his government truly has your best interests at heart summarises this strategy quite neatly.
“We are committed to improving quality of life. We want new buildings to have less impact on the environment and be more aesthetically pleasing. We do not just plan to deliver more open and green spaces through public projects, we also want private projects to deliver this.”
That’s it. That’s the only mention of the environment we get in the whole piece. Of course, no mention of how projects like Camilleri’s Villa Rosa or Silvio Debono’s towers were never wanted by anyone in the locality. Never mind that they steamrolled over fierce resistance that took years to overcome, or the fact that the only tangible benefit that is derived by such projects goes straight into the pockets of the mega-developers that finance them, not the citizens who suffer a decline in their quality of life.
It is always the same wherever you look. All the pressing issues which are consistently on the electorate’s mind are handled with the bare minimum effort required to placate the audience. Worried about shrinking countryside? Here’s a park in the middle of a flyover. Worried about gross overspending? Here, take this tax cut to soothe your nerves. Worried about the exploitation of foreign workers? Here’s another toothless authority that will do fuck all to rein in abusive employers.
Just like a hungry customer willing to eat anything, we’ve become so deprived of real leadership that there is a significant chunk of the population that is somewhat satisfied by the mediocrity they are being served. No matter how rotten or questionable the provenance of the offer is, it seems almost tempting to take whatever’s available instead of nothing at all. I urge you to avoid falling for it.
Robert Abela and his government aren’t taking Malta to the next level.
At best, they’re taking Malta for a ride.
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