You can’t say he didn’t warn you – and yet you didn’t see it coming
With Muscat, you always have to look at the qualifier in his doublespeak. He always follows the same pattern: he makes a firm statement (which then gets picked up by the media as a soundbite and is believed by The People), but qualifies it (which the press reports but without understanding that THIS and not the firm statement, is the real news).
I got fed up of being shouted down in the general election campaign and I can’t say it’s much fun having the last laugh when I have to live through it with those who yelled all kinds of insults at me for not seeing ‘Joseph’ as the road to glory. It was pointless telling them to listen, really listen, to what he says.
Take this story in The Times (as it was called then) of 31 January 2013, when the country was in general election mode. The headline is ODZ BOUNDARIES WON’T BE TOUCHED, SAYS MUSCAT.
But then you read the story and it says something quite, quite different – that he’s planning to do more than ‘touch’ the boundaries, that he’s going to use ODZ land for “schools and hospitals”. But the press didn’t pick up on it because they ran with the first statement: that he did not foresee any change to the ODZ boundaries.
That is in itself a major red flag. Had he really no intention of changing ODZ boundaries, he would have said: “A Labour government will leave ODZ boundaries exactly as they are.”
Read the relevant bit of report in The Times, with the benefit of hindsight:
Opposition Leader Joseph Muscat said he did not see the possibility of outside development zones being changed by a Labour government.
“It will all boil down to discussions and negotiations but I want to make it clear that we will start off from the premise that the boundaries of the outside development zones will not be touched,” he said yesterday.
However, the issue posed a challenge especially because outside development zones were the places where schools and hospitals, for example, had room for expansion, he added.