With friends like these..

IF Malta wanted to destroy Gozo as a tourism base, and thereby wipe out its entire economy, there are a number of ways this could easily be achieved.
The first step, as with any campaign, would be to disrupt communications. A simple method of approaching this would be to announce, with great fanfare, plans to reconstruct the ferry terminals as “all-weather” harbours, and then to start building work simultaneously at each end of the route – a sure-fire tactic to guarantee maximum chaos. Then it would quietly abandon the work halfway, after denying access to a café, removing a tourist office, post office, ATM machine, sandwich shop and bank from one side, while ensuring that there were no adequate facilities (not even a waiting room) at the other.
It would allow a helicopter company to continue operating an unreliable service long after it had been declared substandard in aeronautical terms, withdraw it before a replacement could be found, and then appoint a foreign operator on a lop-sided contract with a haphazard timetable and aircraft that were half the size of those they replaced.
Meanwhile it would transpire that the all-weather harbours and three impressive and expensive new all-weather ships could not operate when it was, er… windy.
The destruction of a number of historic buildings would be surreptitiously sanctioned and there would be no rush to rebuild them. One of these would dominate the harbour as if to secure as the first impression of any tourists accidentally finding their way to Gozo that the place was an on-going building site. The most ancient edifice on the island (and, coincidentally, on the planet) would be permanently surrounded by scaffolding, to illustrate the apparent fact that no construction project was ever actually completed on Gozo, not even after 5,000 years.
Raw sewage would be pumped out into the sea at some of the most attractive beaches within the archipelago and inland beauty spots would be allowed to be used for illegal dumping of waste. Hunters who menaced and threatened ramblers on coastal walks would pursue their sport, regardless of the season, without interference by the authorities.
Malta would allow heavy wagons, overladen and with insecure loads, often with no working lights, to embark unchecked from Cirkewwa and to roar through narrow streets pumping out black smoke from their exhausts across pavement cafes and market stalls.
But it would refuse to consider proposals for a golf course or an airstrip on the grounds that it was “protecting the environment”.
Rather than being promoted as a separate and quiet destination, Gozo would be marketed by Maltese businesses only as a day trip centre, more or less along the lines of an off-shore theme park. Not much different, really, from Popeye Village.
If Malta was determined to deter tourists from its “sister” island, and keep visitors for itself, that would probably be how it would set about achieving its aim.
Naturally, it would try not to be too obvious. It would want to appear to be working for Gozo, while working against it.
It might, for example, announce a “new” road, funded by the EU. This would be a proposal guaranteed to cause total disruption for tourists throughout at least one season but one that would not cut a single minute from the current journey time nor provide one jot more comfort for motorists along its route. Meanwhile the government would quietly ignore requests to improve tourist routes (to Ramla Bay, Xlendi, Dwerja, Ta Cenc, Hondoq) beyond the state of Sicilian farm roads. Gozo’s history started with cart tracks from Italy to Libya and there has been little apparent improvement since then..
It would propose improving the main car park in Victoria – by digging it up. It might promise to restart work on the abandoned harbour project – but not until the tourist season resumed. It would claim that all this was evidence of the amount of concern the larger island had about ensuring the success of Gozo as an upmarket (and different) destination, and proof that the main island was eager to direct some of its five-star tourists away from its own undersold luxury hotels, in favour of a greener and more pleasant resort centre.
The more astute reader will have gathered by now that all of the above is exactly what has been happening over the past few years.
Gozo has only one industry and that is tourism. Every other activity – agriculture, fishing, construction – survives only to support it. The schools are there to educate the children of people who live off tourism. Shops and government offices exist to service the residents who make a living, directly or indirectly, out of tourism. There is virtually no other commercial activity because Malta keeps the bulk of any incoming business on the main island, just as it hogs the tourists.
Of course, nobody believes (do they?) that Malta is bent on hampering Gozo’s tourist industry. Nobody believes that Malta, having made such a ham-fisted job of attracting tourists to the south island and in the absence of an actual surplus of visitors, would be positively discouraging visitors to its own off-shore island, and maintaining the place only as its personal bolt-hole for weekends and holidays.
But that sure is the way it looks.
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