Australia Hall is likely to be incorporated into the new Chinese embassy complex, and that’s why the government dropped the case
China is going to be building a vast new embassy in Pembroke – between St Catherine’s School and Australia Hall, as it happens.
So the news a few days ago, that the government has dropped the case to take back Australia Hall from the Labour Party (it is state property but was given on contractual lease to the Labour Party by Mintoff’s government of the 1970s), should not have been a surprise.
The Labour Party has no need of Australia Hall as a building. It never actually used the place. It lay abandoned for years, falling into complete disrepair. There was a fire which turned it into a wreck, and it lost its roof.
Those are the grounds on which the government (Nationalist), through the Commissioner of Lands, sued the Labour Party to get it back. Its lease contract stipulated that it had to maintain the building in good repair. It has done the opposite.
It doesn’t seem to have paid the rent on it, either. As at 1997, it owed Lm250,000 (Eur582,500) in rent, but Prime Minister Alfred Sant waived the debt. We don’t know whether they have paid any rent since.
Now, when the Opposition protested that the case was dropped, and said how scandalous it is that the Labour government should stop proceedings against the Labour Party, the government (why not the Labour Party?) responded that it has plans for Australia Hall and that it will be restored.
Really? So now the Labour Party, as well as having a bottomless war-chest to fight election campaigns, also has the millions required to restore a building that is little more than a wreck, and the surrounding land.
I think we will eventually find that the government dropped the case because the Labour Party wants to make the building available to China as part of the adjacent embassy complex, and profit from it.
10 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
The only thing left to prove that Joseph Muscat is now China’s poodle is for him to say ‘woof’.
Wonderful – like this China can make a payment directly to the Labour Party filling its coffers to have millions to fight the next election. Disingenuous.
No wonder the Nationalist Party is bankrupt – it never pulled scams like this. If there ever was proof that the PN itself is not corrupt (even though certain individuals may have been) it is in this very fact.
Actually the PN went bankrupt as a party everytime they were in government. But the general public tolerates this type of parasitic behaviour if it is the Labour in government.
In the 90s Labour had plans for Australia Hall but MEPA scheduled the building as a grade 2 heritage site in 1996 putting a spanner in their works. On a cold stormy night in December 1998, under driving rain, the abandoned Australia Hall miraculously self-combusted with firefighters having more than just a suspicion that it was arson.
Unluckily for some, the walls and facade remained sound and the Grade 2 scheduling was confirmed by MEPA. Now it seems that Labour can finally cash in on the gift it gave to itself when in government way back in the Seventies.
Is this, precisely, what CORRUPTION made of?
Meanwhile, who says that the Chinese government (read: the Chinese Communist party), or one of its World Bank black-listed companies, will not submit an “expression of interest” for the Marsa Shipbuilding “maritime centre” and will not eventually be selected as the “preferred bidder”?
So now it’s China Hall.
Now that China has lost its friend in Australia (Mr. Kevin Rudd), they’ve found a new one in Europe.
Daphne please stop…..I’m so disgusted by the current state of affairs I cannot read yout blog any longer!
I actually thought they were going to take over what was going to become Malta’s sports complex at White rocks.