Adrian Delia: On leaving sick children with a hairdresser

PN leader Adrian Delia drew on an episode encountered by his wife this week to explain Malta’s predicament under Labour.

Speaking in Victoria Gozo, Dr Delia said his wife was at the grocer and people were speaking about the flu and sick children. Then the women present began asking with whom would they leave their sick children listing a number of rather unsuitable persons with whom the mothers could leave their sick children the hairdresser, the tool shop, the cobbler, etc.

That is precisely what the government is doing: it is leaving our children with totally unsuitable carers.

Dr Delia went even further: 1200 years ago the pirates raided Gozo and took the men while they left women and children behind.

Dr Delia spoke first about the Vitals - Gozo General Hospital saga. The government gave our hospitals to Vitals, who had no experience in healthcare, for 30 years and paid them handsomely for this. Malta gave Vitals €72 million a year. They are raping us and we are letting them, Dr Delia said. The contract with Vitals says they cannot sell their holding under three years unless they get the government’s permission. So the government is complicit in what is happening.

We can either stay silent or we can rise up in the face of such a situation, Dr Delia said, making it clear that by rising up he meant speaking up. The PN will not stay silent when the people is being robbed.

Next, Dr Delia spoke about the American University of Malta, a deal made with someone who had not managed not even a school or a college before. Government allowed them to build a university for 4000 students and gave them land in Cospicua and land in Marsascala.

But instead of 4000 students just 14 came. Will the land given be turned over to allow building speculation through the selling of flats, Dr Delia asked.

One of Malta’s biggest problems is traffic: with some 950 new cars coming in every day, in three years’ time Malta will face gridlock. What did government do: the biggest line item in this year’s Budget is the spending of €700 million on the roads. They will be digging up the roads and covering them again so that what takes you today an hour and a half to travel will still take you an hour and a half but you will be spending that time on smooth roads instead of rough ones. It seems the government’s real intention was to allow someone to get a piece of all that money.

As for financial services, Dr Delia accused the government of risking Malta’s hard-earned reputation and resulting in Malta being accused of being a hotbed of corruption.

His two-day visit to Gozo had enabled him to learn one basic fact; today’s PL government is a new-look one, very different from the 1980s one but it is still one which aims to take money from people. 60 per cent of those who work, do so with the government and thus no one risks his employment by criticising the government. This is how the government is raping Gozo.

Prior to Dr Delia, Chris Said said we must not mix the Vitals deal with the Barts Medical School deal. Contrary to Vitals, Barts is world-renowned but even here the government has not delivered what it promised. Dr Said charged that it was rivalry between the present Minister for Gozo and her predecessor that is leading to the demolition of the milk facility built by EU help so as to establish there the Law Courts.