Only a few days have passed and the new mass transport project announced with such fanfare last Thursday by Minister Chris Bonett already appears to be nothing more than another promise of the infamous “silly season”, the nationalist Party said Monday.
Confirmation of this came from the Government itself: first from Minister Clyde Caruana and then from Prime Minister Robert Abela himself, both of whom confirmed that no costings had been carried out on what Chris Bonett presented and that we are still in the dark as to exactly how much this project will cost, the PN said.
In an interview with MaltaToday yesterday, the Minister for Finance confirmed that he had not been consulted and was even less convinced about the project’s viability. So much so that he said he was not prepared to give his approval if “the numbers do not make sense”, even if that meant resigning should the government proceed with it.
“You cannot have the cake and eat it,” the Finance Minister went on to say, while implying that this project is not a priority.
This is not the first time Clyde Caruana has openly expressed scepticism about this project. Last September he had described Robert Abela’s promises about the metro as “silly season proposals”, meaning empty promises made before every election. Now he is threatening that if the Government proceeds without his blessing, “as with everything in life, one Pope dies and another takes his place”.
Shortly after this declaration by Clyde Caruana, in an apparent attempt to placate him in light of the threat being made by the Finance Minister not to approve the project, Robert Abela himself also admitted in an interview on Super One that the viability of the project announced by the Government still needs to be assessed.
It is disappointing that once again, on a matter so important for the country and for the Maltese and Gozitan people, we have leading exponents of the Labour Government who are not even in agreement with one another., the PN said
After wasting 14 full years, it is clear that this Government will never succeed in delivering this important and necessary project for our country.
From what we have heard so far about the plan put forward by the Labour Government, the only thing the Maltese and Gozitan people can be certain of is that they face another five years stuck in traffic while the Government continues studying the matter so that perhaps work may begin in another four years, and a new system may arrive in another 15 years’ time.
By contrast, with the PN, you know where you stand, the party said. Within the first 100 days of a new Nationalist Government led by Alex Borg, an implementation framework for a mass transport project would be launched, and within the first legislature the first line of this modern transport system, so urgently needed by our country, would be completed.
