The customary budget ritual is in full swing. Bombast by the Minister of Finance, followed by denouncements of irresponsibility by the Leader of the Opposition and then a barrage of scorn by the Prime Minister. In an atmosphere of the deaf shouting at the deaf, I feel not in the least inclined to discuss it.
What is the point of making even the most constructive criticism if at the outset it is clear that the government will decide everything alone, smacking down every critic and never giving credit to those who make valuable contributions even as they are plagiarized? Having humiliated the MCESD over the hike in energy tariffs, the government is rushing ahead with its plan as though it ruled the country only for the most rabid of its partisans.
For those who were persuaded that Greens in government would have been a threat to stability and (long ugly word) governability, this is a moment when they could feel justified. Greens could not participate in a government like this. Their presence would have made this behaviour impossible. By keeping them out of parliament and out of office, voters have secured the perpetuation of Mintoffian style government sometimes by the PN and sometimes by the MLP.
Chances are that a significant segment of the electorate likes it this way. Still in the Dark Ages of democratic development, they perceive Dr Austin Gatt’s swashbuckling exploits as spot on. Not everybody.
Some of us voted for EU membership precisely to end this nonsense. The vast, if shallow and rapid, stakeholder consultation exercise in the EU accession process whetted our appetite for inclusive government. It was a first experience of the wealth of possible contributions ordinary citizens could make of their professional and sectoral experience and expertise.
Since 2003 it has been one long betrayal of all such hopes. To participate in MEUSAC or MCESD has become complicity in sustaining a façade of consultation while the pre-EU membership sultanate ruled untrammeled. In 2008 the last shreds of justification on the basis of better-a-façade-than-nothing-at-all have all been blown clean away.
The government has provoked the unimaginable: first a joint statement criticizing the government by all civil society bodies and now an all-union demonstration. The unions’ principal demand is authentic consultation. Ironically what is essentially a conservative part of society in so far as it has an interest in resisting change in the interest of its membership, is currently the principal driving force seeking the attainment of the EU Dream method and style of government.
In smashing all the mirrors and tearing down all the veils, Minister Gatt has revealed our political reality in all its awesome ugliness. With far less spectacle, Minister Fenech has helped him along in an aside in which he revealed that the Malta Resources Authority was deliberately left on the sidelines twiddling its thumbs on the issue of electricity tariff revolution. Our most crucial regulators can be disabled at the flick of a political switch. In Strasbourg MEP Simon Busuttil has been active in a venetian blinds exercise over the Ramla Bay petition to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament. Another regulator has fallen victim to political expedience, in this case: MEPA.
In its fifth term since 1987, the PN in government is displaying all the symptoms of fear and insecurity of a minority government too long in office. It seeks total control. Exclusion has become its hallmark, advisory institutions are mocked and regulators disabled. Overhabituation with being the government has shorn it of all the profoundly democratic values gained in its years in exile in the 1980s. The post 1987 years of reconciliation are long gone. The wisdom which suppressed retaliation and sought to bridge the unbridgeable divide in its first term, is lost.
This government through its acolytes and apologists is banking on a propaganda campaign unearthing the horrors of the 1980s to smear the brand new Leader of the Opposition. Nothing better to rely on? No insight to the jarring anachronism? Which PN guru has determined that the party’s last salvation lies in scaremongering and exclusion at the cost of its avowed democratic and European values?
The final cruel irony is that the MLP’s failure to seek EU membership left it to the PN to achieve it and now the PN is in a far better position to eat the heart out of the values EU membership should represent from the inside. The hopes of better quality politics in mutual respect and widespread participation allowing a careful consideration of the issues with full information at hand are all but dead. The PN has smothered those hopes in their infancy. It may take generations before we can entertain them again.
Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party
http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/
What is the point of making even the most constructive criticism if at the outset it is clear that the government will decide everything alone, smacking down every critic and never giving credit to those who make valuable contributions even as they are plagiarized? Having humiliated the MCESD over the hike in energy tariffs, the government is rushing ahead with its plan as though it ruled the country only for the most rabid of its partisans.
For those who were persuaded that Greens in government would have been a threat to stability and (long ugly word) governability, this is a moment when they could feel justified. Greens could not participate in a government like this. Their presence would have made this behaviour impossible. By keeping them out of parliament and out of office, voters have secured the perpetuation of Mintoffian style government sometimes by the PN and sometimes by the MLP.
Chances are that a significant segment of the electorate likes it this way. Still in the Dark Ages of democratic development, they perceive Dr Austin Gatt’s swashbuckling exploits as spot on. Not everybody.
Some of us voted for EU membership precisely to end this nonsense. The vast, if shallow and rapid, stakeholder consultation exercise in the EU accession process whetted our appetite for inclusive government. It was a first experience of the wealth of possible contributions ordinary citizens could make of their professional and sectoral experience and expertise.
Since 2003 it has been one long betrayal of all such hopes. To participate in MEUSAC or MCESD has become complicity in sustaining a façade of consultation while the pre-EU membership sultanate ruled untrammeled. In 2008 the last shreds of justification on the basis of better-a-façade-than-nothing-at-all have all been blown clean away.
The government has provoked the unimaginable: first a joint statement criticizing the government by all civil society bodies and now an all-union demonstration. The unions’ principal demand is authentic consultation. Ironically what is essentially a conservative part of society in so far as it has an interest in resisting change in the interest of its membership, is currently the principal driving force seeking the attainment of the EU Dream method and style of government.
In smashing all the mirrors and tearing down all the veils, Minister Gatt has revealed our political reality in all its awesome ugliness. With far less spectacle, Minister Fenech has helped him along in an aside in which he revealed that the Malta Resources Authority was deliberately left on the sidelines twiddling its thumbs on the issue of electricity tariff revolution. Our most crucial regulators can be disabled at the flick of a political switch. In Strasbourg MEP Simon Busuttil has been active in a venetian blinds exercise over the Ramla Bay petition to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament. Another regulator has fallen victim to political expedience, in this case: MEPA.
In its fifth term since 1987, the PN in government is displaying all the symptoms of fear and insecurity of a minority government too long in office. It seeks total control. Exclusion has become its hallmark, advisory institutions are mocked and regulators disabled. Overhabituation with being the government has shorn it of all the profoundly democratic values gained in its years in exile in the 1980s. The post 1987 years of reconciliation are long gone. The wisdom which suppressed retaliation and sought to bridge the unbridgeable divide in its first term, is lost.
This government through its acolytes and apologists is banking on a propaganda campaign unearthing the horrors of the 1980s to smear the brand new Leader of the Opposition. Nothing better to rely on? No insight to the jarring anachronism? Which PN guru has determined that the party’s last salvation lies in scaremongering and exclusion at the cost of its avowed democratic and European values?
The final cruel irony is that the MLP’s failure to seek EU membership left it to the PN to achieve it and now the PN is in a far better position to eat the heart out of the values EU membership should represent from the inside. The hopes of better quality politics in mutual respect and widespread participation allowing a careful consideration of the issues with full information at hand are all but dead. The PN has smothered those hopes in their infancy. It may take generations before we can entertain them again.
Dr Vassallo is a Member of the Committee of the European Green Party
http://www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com/
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