Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1028264
25 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 16 SEPTEMBER 2018 OPINION principle of demand and sup- ply. If a Nationalist or Labour voter is only ever interested in electing a Nationalist or La- bour government... and even then, only ever for its own sake... what impetus does ei- ther party have to even bother with such things as 'policies' and 'political principles'? Forget it. Waste of time. Much easier to just concen- trate on bashing your political opponents, even while pro- posing the same way of doing politics yourself. That's what voters want; and being such an easy thing to deliver, that is the only thing they've ever been given, and will ever get in future. For starters, that explains why nothing ever changes on the policy front. Most of the people commenting about Thursday's protest – from both perspectives, please note – seem to be unaware of what the protest was even about. Some evidently thought that it was an attempt to influence the decision to be taken at the PA board meeting itself: giv- ing rise to the argument that it was 'useless' (or 'a success', depending on your point of view), because the PA went on to reject the applications for new petrol stations anyway. But that was not the reason for the protest. Moviment Graffiti's entire point was that the vote should not have been taken at all, because a new petrol station policy should already be in place by now – making all those applications illegal – but isn't, because the PA has chosen to drag its feet on implementation. This changes the entire land- scape: the real issue at stake is the institution's reluctance to enforce a policy which would limit the number of new pet- rol stations to begin with. And as long as that policy remains unenforced, new applications will simply keep rolling in, with no end in sight. Nor is this the only thing that will remain unchanged. On a separate level, Thurs- day's event also illustrates why both parties seem stuck in the same rut: incapable of ever attracting any new people with anything interest- ing to say, because the parties themselves are clearly not interested in ever represent- ing anything but their own, self-absorbed concerns. So no matter how many new faces they slap up on their campaign billboards, the mes- sage is always identical. It's never a case of, 'Vote for us, because we have a vision that is worth believing'; but always, 'Vote for us, because we're not them'. Even if... um... 'we are them', and 'they are us', as routinely evidenced by the de- pressing consistency of both parties' actions. This also leaves us all with a permanently unresolved dilemma. Clearly, the political system – in and of itself – is incapable of ever delivering anything different. It doesn't want to; and its supporters don't want it to either. What choice does this leave for those among us who do care about environmental issues – or indeed any other non-partisan issue, of any kind at all? Not much, as far as I can see. You either resign yourself to the status quo; or try and do something about it, and get dragged off kicking and screaming into oblivion. The one option that is no longer realistically avail- able, however, is to carry on pretending you care... while simultaneously upholding the same political system that perpetuates the rot you supposedly care about. That much, at least, should by now be visible to absolutely everybody. Unlike Moviment Graffiti, which has a clear political identity of its own, the average Maltese political supporter has no such political centre of gravity, and neither knows nor cares what the two parties even represent