Prime Minister invites new PN leader to reverse decision on waste strategy committee

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, while congratulating Adrian Delia for being elected PN leader, lost no time in setting him a task to show how he is different from his predecessor.

Speaking at Żebbuġ, Dr Muscat said he hoped to invite Dr Delia to meet him once he (Dr Muscat) was back from the US, where he went later yesterday to take part in the UN General Assembly.

But then he invited Dr Delia to, by yesterday evening or by today, revert the decision taken by the PN last week to stay out of a committee which will study the options Malta faces on waste disposal strategy.

The PN reply to an invitation by Minister Jose Herrera apparently was that it is the government which has to govern and the Opposition wants no share of that as its role is, in its opinion, different.

Dr Muscat said Dr Delia is the third PN leader he has had to face. The government is guided by humility: it must neither overestimate nor underestimate people. Meanwhile, this government keeps close to the people.

Earlier, Dr Muscat said he watched the speeches from the PN convention on Friday. He referred especially to Simon Busuttil’s last speech as party leader. If one turned the sound off, it would have seemed that Dr Busuttil had won the election. There was arrogance in his words. Everyone feels better now that Dr Busuttil is out of the picture.

His question now is: Will the PN under Dr Delia remain as negative as it was under Dr Busuttil or will it change its tone?

One of the challenges Malta is facing is that relating to waste disposal. Waste in Malta keeps increasing, as a result of a better quality of life where we get the ‘usa e getta’ mentality. Waste will continue to increase even if the government increases awareness about recycling. (Dr Muscat here said that even he did not know all the intricacies of the recycling laws such as the colour of the bags and the days when these bags can be put out).

Malta is the only country in the EU which landfills all its waste. The only other country in Europe to do so is Turkey but they have much more land.

As a result of past inaction on this issue, today Malta’s highest mountain is made up of our waste and rubbish. The present landfill is almost full up. Its replacement would take up some 50 tumoli, when the American University of Malta took up just 20. And this would last us some 10 years, after which a new site must be found which will last for a further eight years.

That is why the drastic decision was taken to move towards incineration. Technology has moved ahead: this process is very different from the incineration process of past years. Even cities such as Vienna and German cities have incinerators in the middle of the city and the process is safe.

This was where Minister Herrera invited the Opposition to nominate a member to the committee to oversee the process but was rebuffed by the PN as led by its former leader.

At the beginning of his speech, Dr Muscat welcomed the Marsa mayor who chose to be present at Żebbuġ rather than join in the march organised by those who were bent on exploiting emotions on the immigration issue. You do not solve problems this way. This does not mean that the immigration issue is not a problem and the government intends to take action to tackle it.

Dr Muscat compared the second term in power to the first. In the first term, most of the government had no experience in government at all. And it found a lot of problems that had not been solved by the previous PN administration: unemployment was up, people were telling the government the rates had to go up, government bodies were without funds, investment had dried up, there were problems that seemed impossible to solve, like out-of-stock medicines. The new government refused to accept this as inevitable. It now wants to make Malta ‘future proof’ – in other words, Malta must not wait until overtaken by future technological change, but must be prepared for change before it happens. Infrastructure has to be prepared for new population numbers and its needs and must anticipate change.

On Saturday the Labour parliamentary group met and there was a lot of enthusiasm in the room. The government is now an experienced one and it is a united group.

When big issues come up, the party and the government do not split but they ask themselves what they stand for.

This government stands for change and will continue to change, as it has done on gay couples, equality and drugs. PL is very different from PN, which always asks why there should be change. If we do not change, our children will blame us for not changing in time.

Malta has had leaders who forced change, like Borg Olivier and Independence and Dom Mintoff and his battles. He even had the courage to tell people he will sack their employers and people still loved him for it.

There is still a lot to do as regards equality: women are still not equal to men, even though the difference in wage is not high. There is still under-representation of women and the PL will discuss with the Opposition how to change this.

One thing that really angers him, Dr Muscat said, is the annual statistic by the State Department that puts Malta at the top of the table where it comes to the trafficking of persons. This has got nothing to do with immigrants: it speaks of women from Eastern Europe that are brought to Malta and trafficked as sex slaves.

This is the Malta which has a church for every day of the year. It reeks of hypocrisy big time.

There are two models which can be followed: The Nordic one exonerates the prostitutes but states that the clients would have engaged in a criminal act. The other model says this is not the right way.

As regards drugs, it is easy to say let’s do nothing. The campaigns against drugs have failed. And today there is what is called medicinal use of cannabis. Even he as a father had his doubts about this and needs to study this matter further.

And there is IVF. There are in Malta two frozen embryos. Minister Evarist Bartolo was telling him about a deeply religious family with many holy pictures on show and among them a photo of a young girl, born of IVF.