Editorial: More cake for the have-yachts

In a month dominated by headlines dealing with Malta’s overtourism challenges, it seemed unstylish that the prime minister should employ boat ownership as a yardstick of the upwardly mobile class his centre-left government had nurtured.

Boating is a common enough pastime on an island where skiffs and cabin cruisers abound. And while the garish have-yachts might be a growing caste in Malta, perhaps life at the top is dissocia­ting Robert Abela from the effects of expansive growth on the island.

Whatever the prime minister sees from the wake of his high-end Azimut 50, the way he quantified his party’s record of wealth creation in his interview with Times of Malta was a valuable insight into the establishment’s psyche – electability, it seems, is ultimately won only by caving in to people’s, and donors’, desires, whatever consequence this might have on society.

As the prime minister declared, Labour governments will not penalise conspicuous consumption, irrespective of the ill-effects it might have on society. Indeed, its programme for extensive tax relief instead sells the seduction of wealth – “a new car, modest boat and two holidays a year”, as Abela narrowly quantified what quality of life apparently means to the Maltese.

So people will be eating their cake after all. But they will have to deal with the aftermath – more car ownership, more traffic, more environmental deterioration; more economic growth, higher property prices, more wealth, more overcrowding from overtourism and the manpower imported from Asia.

This, Abela suggested with the serenity of a man who has made peace with contradiction, is the price Maltese society must pay for its ‘cars and boats and two holidays a year’.

Yet, the Maltese are also recoiling at the pains that unfettered growth begets – first-world problems of tourist marauders taking the party island to its logical extreme, cars choking urban centres, littering uglifying Maltese streets, al fresco concessions and restaurant touts making pavements unwalkable and construction galore.

Abela claims his administration can recapture the animal spirit it has unleashed by “minimising the trade-offs” of economic growth – yet, not through degrowth disincentives or strategic environmental management that can minimise urbanisation, overdevelopment, overtourism or promote alternative lifestyle choices.

Instead, his government will attempt to slow down the one conspicuous element of Maltese economic growth: foreign workers who support this economic boom, deployed as shorthand for “population growth”.

It is an ironic choice for a party that styles itself as a workers’ party. Abela is unwilling to reform the property market, unwilling to restrict development rights, unwilling to apply the stick to car ownership or short-let speculation – but entirely willing to reach for immigration restriction as the one lever he is prepared to pull.

Now that the enthusiastic embrace of consumption and profit at all costs is starting to rankle, that resentment is seeking an outlet. The people whose labour paid the rents and staffed the restaurants, hospitals and cleaned the hotels that made the economic boom possible are, it turns out, the trade-off that can be managed. The rest cannot.

With misbehaving tourists, the other conspicuous exemplar, on-the-spot fines turn out to be enforcement by embarrassment, action taken only after footage goes viral. Where is the enforcement for the operators running unlicensed apartments or the way the AirBnB platform economy turns residential neighbourhoods into hostels?

Abela said people cannot have the cake and eat it. In Malta, the cake is generally eaten by those with the capital to bake it. The mess is cleared up by those who live downstairs.