Why is the PN defending Enemalta?

If someone told me 20 years ago that the same PN which once boasted about winding up the Malta Dockyard (with all the loss of employment and transfer of national debt that particular endeavour had entailed), would base its entire 2013 re-election bid on the defence of yet another failed national corporation - this time, one that owes almost a billion in debt, and is even singled out in the Standards & Poor report as the biggest financial albatross around our country's neck - I would have probably told them to go try brainwashing someone else.

Yet such is the absurdity of our age that this is precisely what is happening. Nearly all the talk in this electoral debate has so far been exclusively about the energy sector... yet nobody seems to have joined the dots and realized where all this talk is ultimately headed. All those articles, discussions, accusations and counter-accusations - not to mention the oh-so-many questions about whether Labour's plan is doable, feasible, desirable, practicable, etc - yet nobody seems to have even noticed what this entire debate is really about.

No, it's not about whether LNG is preferable to delivery by pipeline. It's actually whether our country can afford to continue being blackmailed by its own national energy provider... forever.

OK, let me try another tack. Am I the only one who thought it was slightly strange, that of all institutions it had to be the Labour Party to propose hiving off 40% of Enemalta to the private sector... when the same Labour Party had fought so hard and for so long against the privatization of so many other national assets: MIA, the Drydocks, Sea Malta, Maltapost, Air Malta and so on?

Never mind what it tells us about the PL's changing attitudes towards privatization (that in itself shouldn't really surprise us - in 1997 Alfred Sant had proposed simply handing over Fort St Elmo to the Knights of St John on a silver platter... sovereignty and all). But why has no one asked what the sale of nearly half of Enemalta would mean in practical terms? Will we be transferring 40% of Enemalta's debt to the private sector, too? If so, what sort of conditions would we expect to find written into the contract, to make the sale attractive to a potential private investor?

And what will happen to the employees? Will there be any 'guarantee' that they will all be retained under the new management... a guarantee of the kind that the GWU had tried (but ultimately failed) to get inserted into the Dockyard contract of sale, and is still trying to secure with Air Malta?

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of unions... where are they, anyway? I haven't heard so much as a squeak from the General Workers' Union about the uncertain future of Enemalta employees. Or indeed about anything else, come to think of it. What happened, folks? Let me guess: is it a case of... 'issa daqshekk'?

OK, to be fair there has been a little talk about at least this aspect of the plan. Joseph Muscat has apparently assured workers that their jobs will be secure. He has hinted that some of them may be re-employed with the new company, which will be running a new 200MW power plant of its own (and will presumably need experienced employees). If not, one assumes that the remaining 60% of Enemalta left in government's hands after the transaction will have to employ 100% of the former corporation's workforce.

Anyway: exactly how Muscat can assure workers that their jobs are secure, when he officially doesn't know who the buyer even is - still less the specific terms of a contract that has yet to be drawn up - is anybody's guess. What I can safely say, in my capacity as a long-suffering victim of Enemalta's ill-gotten monopoly of energy in this country... quite frankly I don't give a damn if he manages or not.

Yes, you heard right. Whether or not Enemalta's employees lose their jobs is probably the least of my concerns in the entire debate. And to be totally, perfectly and brutally honest...I would not shed a single, salt tear for Enemalta; not even if it were dismantled altogether, smashed into little pieces and fed to the fishes of Marsa creek... ideally, to be replaced by an energy provider that actually provides energy for, say, 95% of the time, instead of what feels like around 70.

Quite frankly I would rate that as an overwhelming improvement over the present energy situation: even if (or rather, especially because) I'd be forced to buy my electricity from the private sector, instead of from a company that evidently thinks it is administered directly by God himself.

What? No, I wasn't really expecting anyone else to agree with me on this particular point. Nor do I expect others to share in my constant bewilderment at how this country just never ceases to enjoy being shafted up its rear end. On the contrary, I expect the overwhelming majority to simply buy into the usual ancient myth about how people somehow 'deserve' to be kept eternally in employment at the taxpayer's expense... even when they not only fail to deliver a level of service that would be considered basic anywhere else in the civilized world... but even when the corporation that employs them is the equivalent of a bottomless sinkhole into which literally hundreds of millions of euros simply disappear without a trace... yes, even when it directly threatens the future economic wellbeing of everybody else.

But anyway. Now that my anti-Enemalta bias is off my chest, let us return to the so-called energy debate. The really interesting thing about this whole business is that - provided that Joseph Muscat really is successful, and Malta does get to shed 40% of the €800 million debt that we don't actually include in our 'official' national debt figures to begin with - it would arguably be the first step towards relieving Malta of the total burden of Enemalta, which we now know (thanks to the infamous S&P report) will be the millstone that eventually bursts our little 'finanzi fis-sod' bubble once and for all.

And if he manages to do that without also letting slip the dogs of unemployment - something I sincerely doubt is even possible, but anyhow - well, so much the goddamn better. (That gripe I just had at the expense of Enemalta employees, above? It's nothing personal, you know. It's not that I resent the fact that these people exist, or that they are employed, or anything like that. I'd just be a lot happier if they were productively employed by a company that actually gives a toss about losing tonnes of other people's money, that's all...)

But while I retain doubts about Joseph Muscat's ability to actually deliver on that promise, his approach nonetheless represents a recognizable break with tradition when it comes to talking about the energy sector in this country. It is no longer an approach that is premised by a total, irrational defence of a monopoly which would be considered illegal in most other parts of the world (including 99% of the EU, by the way); on the contrary, it is an approach that departs from the premise that the same monopoly is unsustainable... and takes the unprecedented initiative to start actually chipping away at the corners.

And this brings me emphatically to the surreal part of this entire discussion: the reaction by the party in government, which (strangely, for a supposedly centre-right party that still boasts about having 'rescued' the economy from the clutches of the Malta shipyards) has taken it upon itself to defend Enemalta's right to carry on sponging like a leech off the Maltese energy consumer... while actively denying us access to other, independent sources of energy.

Step one in the PN's entire energy policy? Simple: a wholesale defence of Enemalta, staring with a letter to its employees warning them that Labour's energy plans could 'cost them their job'.

I must confess this news item sort of floored me when I read it. Not so much because there is anything unusual about Enemalta employees fearing for their jobs (personally, I think their fear is entirely justified). Nor do I find it particularly shocking or reprehensible that a political party would seek to capitalize on that fear for electoral gain. (I mean, come on folks: this is an election, and the stakes are high on both sides).

No, what I find positively astounding is that the PN's attitude towards the 1,000+ Enemalta employees is IDENTICAL to that of the Malta Labour Party towards the Dockyard employees in the days of Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. And they are talking to them in exactly the same language, too: reinforcing the misconception that these people are somehow 'owed' a living... even if it bleeds the country's finances dry to keep them employed.

Worse: they are also feeding them the gross calumny that it is anything other than an anomaly to have the electricity sector entirely in the hands of the government... when the reality is that Malta negotiated an exception from an EU rule that would otherwise make it a crime to administer of the sort of national monopoly still enjoyed by Enemalta at our expense.

And this, I greatly fear, is not just a knee-jerk reaction to counter an unexpected electoral coup by Labour... on the contrary, the PN has allowed itself to become ideologically committed to retaining that same corporations' ghastly monopoly as an end in itself.

For even when the PN talks about the 'interconnector' as if it were a magic wand that would instantly solve our country's energy problems, by linking us up to the European grid... it is still on the understanding that Enemalta would buy energy directly from Europe, and resell it to us on their own terms.

How does that actually represent an improvement over the present scenario... when by Enemalta's own admission, the issue does not concern energy generation at all, but energy distribution?

Besides: I would have thought the whole point of the interconnector (or any other form of direct link to the European grid) was to allow Maltese consumers to benefit from the same advantage available to all their European counterparts... and shop around for the best deals directly from source. What good is it to know that the electricity powering your home was originally generated in France, Italy in Germany... when the reality is that you're still buying it from one source, at one, non-negotiable price?

But when all is said and done, it is the sheer reversal of roles that shocks me. Who would ever have predicted that the PN would become such a Communist party after 22 years in office? Who would have ever guessed that the party of George Borg Olivier, Eddie Fenech Adami, and... um... well, that's it really... would by 2013 have migrated so far to the extreme left, that it now does what Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici used to do, and defend indefensible government monopolies, against the spirit of entrepreneurship that it once championed itself?

Not I, that's for sure. (But then I'm the only the piano player, so I hardly count.)