New Parliament, same old charade

Sometimes I almost feel like Hannibal Lecter in that scene where he first meets Jodie Foster in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.

Not, I hasten to add, because of
any latent cannibalistic tendencies
of my own (though who knows? I do get awfully hungry sometimes...). But if you know the scene I’m talking about, you will probably remember that there was a television on in the background: permanently stuck
on the same Evangelical Christian channel, and kept at maximum volume 24 hours a day... all part of Lecter’s ‘punishment’ for killing a fellow inmate at a maximum security mental hospital.

Well, following the news in Malta often feels like much the same form of punishment. It’s an endlessly repeated transmission of the same old crap, recycled and repackaged according to the circumstances of the day... but look through the external veneer, and the pattern you will see beneath is essentially always the same: an unwavering concatenation of the exact same mistakes, made in practically the exact same order, by different governments over the past 30 years.

Take this week’s inauguration of the new House of Parliament, for instance. Watching the ceremony
of TV brought with it an almost overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Here we had a large-scale project costing around 100 million euros, finally completed after a spate of missed deadlines and delays... and what

do you know? No sooner are works approaching completion, than we suddenly realise that the new building is actually too small to accommodate all the facilities associated with a Parliament... with the result that the promise of a supposedly ‘public part’ on the ground floor has since been thrown out of the window.

Conversely, we also discover that the same building is also too large for the logistical purposes of providing round-the-clock security. The police, we are told, just can’t cope with the new responsibility. So presumably, other areas of law enforcement will have to suffer to accommodate our MPs’ new obsession with national security. Yet incredibly, no one ever saw this eminently predictable problem until just a few days before the migration.

And just to add to the impression
of an ongoing farcical charade (not to mention maximise the chances of an actual terrorist attack), there is now to be an ‘open day’ for the public to admire the inside of Renzo Piano’s edifice on May 16. So come along, folks. Roll up for the magical mystery tour. Bring family and friends, a packed lunch and maybe a bottle of vino, and we can all have a picnic in the plenary chamber. With so many flowers growing in Parliament these days, it will be just like a day out at the Majjistral national park...
Now where, oh, where have we all seen this sort of nonsense before? Let’s see now... Mater Dei, perhaps?

Ah, yes. The two projects seem
to reflect each other with almost astonishing accuracy at every step of the way. In fact, the only discernible differences concern trivial details such as the total cost (almost 1 billion, in the case of Mater Dei), and the extent of the delays in project completion... the hospital having taken over 20 years to build.

But when it was finally inaugurated in July 2008, the spectacle to which we were all treated was identical to

this week’s Parliamentary charade. Because the project had assumed the mantle of a political controversy in its own right, the government of the day treated it much like a propaganda exercise for its own benefit: so again, everyone and his pet goldfish was invited to gape and gawk at the new state of the art building that had been so generously built for us with our own money. So of course the entire population descended upon Mater Dei en masse, to enjoy any of a number of special activities for all the family: a guided tour of all the machines that go ‘beep’, for instance. Front row seats to enjoy the spectacle of a live colonoscopy, or maybe open brain surgery “at an operating theatre near you...”

Yes, indeed: from a general hospital catering for anything from A&E to long-term palliative care, the political exigencies of the moment allowed Mater Dei to be used as a frigging theme park.

And that, of course, was before 
the limitations of the new hospital were made painfully apparent to one and all. For despite having overshot its original budget by an order of magnitude, Mater Dei turned out
to be considerably smaller than the hospital it had been built to replace. There were (and still are) fewer wards and fewer beds than at St Luke’s. There were even structural deficiencies – the concrete used was too weak to support an additional floor when this became urgently required. Yet nobody ever paused
to think about this until the actual migration process began... and we suddenly realised that not all the old hospital equipment could even be made to fit.

And just when you think a government couldn’t concoct a more gargantuan cock up if it tried.... what do you know? Then-Health Minister John Dalli took the simultaneous decision to wind down several of Malta’s regional health centres...
or ‘polyclinics’, as most people still call them. Brilliant health strategy, don’t you think? First build a new
but smaller hospital and shut the
old one down... then decommission neighbourhood clinics, just to make sure that there is no remaining buffer zone to prevent the country’s only state hospital from being swamped.

Inevitably, then, anyone with any health problem of any description
at all had no real option but to go
to Mater Dei for treatment. So suddenly we found ourselves in a situation where there were more patients in corridors... longer waiting lists, affecting more operations and procedures... nursing staff severely over stretched and slave-driven almost to the brink of collapse, etc. etc...

In a nutshell, all the problems
that Mater Dei had originally been conceived to solve – at a cost of €1 billion, and after a 20-year delay – not only remained in place, but grew considerably worse. It was only when faced with a full-blown medical crisis that the government was forced to hastily re-open several of the health centres it had so unwisely shut down. And having already invited us all to spend our family outings at the new hospital, the health ministry now had to run a billboard campaign urging everyone to steer clear of Mater Dei unless their lives were dangling from a thread.

Yet the overcrowding persisted,
and still persists to this day. So much so, that the present government
is trying to address the manifest shortcomings of Mater Dei by.... wait for it... re-opening St Luke’s Hospital! Unbelievable, but true. In what Bruno Pizzul would have described as a classic ‘capovolgimento di fronte’, the hospital we ‘replaced’ in 2008 is now called upon to ‘replace’ its successor. Not only that, but we even have to build new hospitals from scratch to cater for the spill-over...

Right: back to the new House of Representatives now, and – ooh, what a surprise – the same basic mistakes have been repeated all over again. The institution of parliament has migrated to a building that can’t actually accommodate it... so the plans have to be altered to address this new yet spectacularly predictable cock-up. Somehow, the move to a new building also exponentially increased the budget that has to be diverted towards Parliament each year... if nothing else, there are additional costs to be paid for security.

Incredibly, all of this seems to
have come as an earth-shattering surprise to the political class that has been debating the entire move for over a decade now. Ten years of talking about little but the Great Renzo Piano Caper... and in all this discussion, not a single one of the above-mentioned logistical problems seems to have ever occurred to anyone: despite the fact that we’d only just been through the exact same process with Mater Dei.

And this is in itself the clearest echo from the Mater Dei experience. What that particular fiasco should have taught us (but clearly didn’t)
is that ‘moving to a new building’ does not actually address any of
the systemic faults in any given operation. The intrinsic problems with Malta’s medical service before 2008 remain the same after the migration to a new hospital – and this needn’t surprise us, because as we all know, it is the work practices that have to change... not the building within which those work practices are carried out.

Same with Parliament. It doesn’t actually matter where you house that institution, if it’s going to carry on behaving in such a myopic and spectacularly asinine way. There are systemic problems within Malta’s Parliament that cannot and will not be solved just by a change of venue, even if the new venue were designed for their benefit by the Almighty God himself.

Otherwise, it will just be a case of new Parliament, same old crap...