Robert Abela addressed Labour’s general conference on Sunday knowing he needed to reassure his listeners. The latest opinion poll gave Labour its worst result in a generation. A popular mayor, Conrad Borg Manché, had just dumped Labour, disgusted. Why, even Evarist Bartolo had taken a break from speaking in riddles.

And this is to say nothing about the rest of the population. If construction is taking place next door, and your walls vibrate, you can’t be sure your home won’t collapse.

If you venture outside, you risk encountering a grossly incompetent driver fraudulently licensed by Abela’s government.

Abela stepped up to the podium determined to answer all his critics.

To those, like Borg Manché, who say Labour betrays its socialist principles, Abela would show himself to be a true socialist.

To those who declare that his government has a mission other than self-enrichment, Abela would show he had vision, indeed a 10-year one. And to those who observe he lacks courage to take decisive action against corruption, he would show them who was Malta’s Braveheart.

Abela had been here before. At the last general election, he had bragged of a 1,000-pledge programme designed to shock and awe by being 100 pages longer than Joseph Muscat’s in 2017.

It served up vision and bravery galore and put all other socialist parties to shame. Germany’s Social Democrats never had the vision to declare that “public toilets have an important function” (pledge 964). The UK Labour Party never had the guts to admit: “We recognise that swings and playing fields are used by children of different ages” (960).

Frankly, no political party anywhere in Europe has ever gone to the polls bold enough to promise to enforce reasonable time frames on demolition and construction or so ambitious as to vow to launch an interministerial project to strengthen the current rules against corruption.

This visionary programme itself followed the clairvoyant five-pillar strategy announced in the summer of 2020: sustainable economic growth; good governance; education; infrastructural improvement; and carbon neutrality by 2050.

At the time, Times of Malta had editorialised that, perhaps, these pillars were too vague to allow for clear choices. Rather than a vision, it was a mirage arising from the avoidance of hard tough choices.

But when you’re a visionary you don’t do such detail. Instead, you soar and, on Sunday, Abela did not disappoint.

You want vision? Here’s spadefuls of vision, with cream on top.

Abela wants Malta to produce clean energy. He wants to raise standards in how development is carried out (he’s been promising that for three years but that’s because he’s a consistent visionary).

He wants no place for construction cowboys – or Indians, given that he wants to reform temping agencies. Going out on a socialist limb, Abela wants a country where decisions benefit the many, not the few.

The short-term, opportunistic Muscat sowed; Abela is reaping- Ranier Fsadni

If you’re not gasping already, consider the bravery. The government had been tough enough to regulate Y-plates! It had the courage to decide to retain a national airline (after it messed up the old one). And, hear ye, there’s more courage to come.

I suppose it took real guts to announce that he wants to see more discipline on the roads, given the licensing scandal. But it takes more than guts to keep repeating yourself.

It was at Labour’s general conference of July 2020 that Abela promised tough decisions will be taken. He’s still promising because he hasn’t delivered.

Five months earlier, Carmelo Abela, then minister within the prime minister’s office, wrote in Times of Malta of “problems we should all have seen coming” because of a lack of “proper and sustainable planning”.

At the time, the Abela government was still new enough to take pot-shots at Joseph Muscat’s legacy of deregulating construction and rampant cronyism.

Any fool can create a spurt of economic growth by wholesale deregulation, just as any idiot can take steroids and self-inflate. But, eventually, the wheels will begin to come off: collapsing houses and construction deaths; greylisting and shuttered banks; infrastructural and institutional failures leading to rats, hooligans and dangerous drivers out on the street; demoralised police; high deficit spending at the wrong point of the business cycle, leaving us dangerously exposed when a slump comes.

The short-term, opportunistic Muscat sowed; Abela is reaping. He hasn’t just inherited a government policy that can be reversed. It is a political party’s business model for remaining in power. It can’t be reversed without leading to a government implosion.

Abela’s personal brand is shot, just like Labour’s. But the business model is still functioning, although now increasingly weakened by its own corruption.

He promised the conference, in English: “We can, and will, get the future right.” But his only hope is that, in a political duopoly, he faces an opposition with a better brand but far weaker business model.

Even if Abela were up to it, how could he offer a 21st-century centre-left vision for the new forms of work, energy and capital? He can’t move forward when his party’s business model is to reverse the achievements of the late 20th-century.

That’s why Abela is condemned to repeat himself. He can’t deliver what people are increasingly demanding. He can only hope that repetition will suggest a determined man, not a hollow one.