A godsend in disguise

Quite apart from Dr Borg Olivier’s fate as a consequence of his fumbling at the keyboard, his infamous e-mail offers us all a splendid opportunity we are very likely to miss altogether, a stimulus to fundamental reforms that would allow us to make several democratic and economic leaps forward.

Only the irremediably naïve can express surprise at the content of the e-mail: an institutional and unconstitutional melding of party and government. We all had good reason to suspect it. Many of us had the proof in pre-electoral missives specifically addressed to us on the basis of our professions and occupations, data legitimately available only to the government. Only the self-inflicted blindness of the true partisan can prevent anyone from seeing the constitutional depravity of this system within a system.

Once we have been blessed with Dr Borg Olivier’s blunder, a veritable X-ray of the unavowed, we are challenged to decide where we stand. Before the proof stood before us in all its awful ugliness, we could have avoided the issue, now we cannot. The party and the government have melded into one. The e-mail reveals a complete fusion in the minds of the author and of the intended recipients.

A meeting of key employees of various ministries with the Secretary General of the Nationalist Party at the PN headquarters to discuss the systematic, joint, PN-Government processing of complaints and requests to government by private citizens, speaks volumes about the background political culture. None of the participants appears to have objected or raised the issue of propriety. It did not seem to have occurred to anyone.

The idea of an impermeable barrier between government and party, the government being at great pains not to appear to give its own party any unfair advantage, seems never to have crossed anybody’s mind. The contrary does not register as a venial sin in Maltese political culture. Dr Borg Olivier will not resign because of his misdirection of an e-mail, nor for orchestrating an unconstitutional complaints processing setup explicitly intended as part of a five year PN re-election campaign. This is the apotheosis of the client/patron system combined with totalized government. It is the medieval Siculo-Arab heritage we share with the mafia. It is definitely ours, it is us.

The question is: do we like it this way? Are we merely resigned to it or do we actively promote it? Do we take it for granted and assume its immortality calmly settling down to our learned helplessness, or do we sneer at idealists for even thinking of opposing it, our talents lying in its dexterous exploitation?

Power to the party, necessarily to the party in government whichever it happens to be, means that the one recognized virtue in our society is loyalty to the party. Nothing else really matters. All the talk of meritocracy, of productivity and competitiveness being achieved through education and personal development is not all nonsense, just most of it. If you strongly believe otherwise, strongly oppose the government, show a chink in your unquestioning loyalty at a crucial moment and then tell me about your equal opportunities. If your philosophy is invisibility, living below the political horizon and seeing to No 1, you are not innocent. You have acclimatized to feudal subservience and powerfully sustain the status quo. You have denied yourself the freedom to speak out while you harbour contempt for those who fight for theirs. You are the unmovable mass, most of the problem.

If you are politically labeled, and it may have happened to you for the best of reasons at the worst of times, then your freedom to choose your government is all but lost. All the political arguments you get into are just a smokescreen for the fact that you cannot afford to lose. Once labeled, you have every reason to expect to be discriminated against for at least a decade if your party loses. It does little to allow you a clear mind on your way to the polls. Further government/party melding will only add to your hysteria.

Do we want to live like this forever? Or do we want to say out loud that the content of the Borg Olivier e-mail is profoundly shocking to EU citizens with high aspirations for their future?

I want to believe that there are serious politicians in every political party. Can they admit together that this sort of constitutional confusion has gone far enough? Can they make of Dr Borg Olivier’s fiasco a monumental watershed in our democratic development? Can they make of this most fortunate accident a catalyst for profound, lasting and critical reform?

Never mind

Malta, along with all other EU member states, is a signatory to a draft political declaration to be brought by France before the General Assemby of the United Nations calling for the depenalization of homosexuality worldwide. Even if adopted by the General Assembly such a declaration, on which no vote will be taken, will bind only its signatories. Still, it is a laudable global publication of the stance taken by these countries. Well done Malta.
Decades ago, homosexuality stopped being a criminal offence in Malta. The matter was and remains a taboo for the vast majority but few would have the police investigate anybody’s sexual preferences and much less haul them before a magistrate for it.
Even today the annual Gay Pride event is poorly attended and to a great extent by liberal heterosexuals. Decriminalisation and all, the taboo is alive and well. Fear of discrimination rationalised in various ways, still keeps most gays away from their own celebration. More significantly, it is still the cause of unnecessary personal trauma, family crises and, greatest taboo of all, suicides.
Despite our new status as an ostentatiously liberal nation, thanks to participation in the proposed UN declaration, our first gay and out candidate in a National Election contesting with Alternattiva Demokratika, Ing. Patrick Attard, made history as recently as last March. We are still far from being comfortable with LGBT reality.
What may cause our governent more than the usual discomfort is the contrast with the position taken by the Vatican on the proposed declaration. Its permanent observer at the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, has achieved global notoriety for his stance opposing the declaration. The gay and liberal worlds are up in arms.
In a comment to the French news agency I.Media, Archbishop Migliore premised that all that is done in favour of the respect and protection of individuals is part of our human and spiritual heritage; that the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that every unjust form of discrimination against homosexuals must be avoided. However he went on to add that “such a declaration would require states and international structures applying and monitoring human rights to add new categories requiring protection against discrimination without taking account of the fact that if adopted this would create new and terrible discriminations. For example states which do not recognise same sex unions as marriage would be pilloried and come under pressure.”
All this puts our government in a very peculiar position. Malta is one of the states that does not recognise same sex unions. Does our government see any danger of being pilloried or pressured in future because it opposes the persecution of gays wherever it may take place? Clearly not. Malta is one of the proponents of the controverted declaration.
The sensation caused by the Vatican’s response is due to the inescapable fact that the Vatican, in order not to allow even the remotest possibility of gay marriage appearing over the horizon some time in the future, is prepared to ignore the actual and very real persecution of gays in many countries of the world where they are punished by beatings and even capital punishment. The most barbaric of public executions still take place today.
For Malta the matter is a little more complicated. A government monopolized by a party that traditionally monopolises the catholic faith is in direct collision course with the Vatican. For many Maltese catholics, as for catholics around the world, the matter is one of dismay if not bewilderment. How can we defend or make our own the position taken by Archbishop Migliore? Can any of us witness a beheading or a hanging of a gay person because he is gay, even on television or through the internet and remain unmoved? Even if we may be averse to the recognition of same sex unions, we could not fail to condemn such persecution when asked to do so.
As a proponent with no fear of the consequences, the Maltese government, having the responsibility for a country more catholic than the Vatican, should be able to make a very good case for a Vatican change of heart. If the Vatican’s misgivings about gay marriage are allayed, it must live up to its words in favour of human dignity.
However it is far more probable that Malta will lie low, ignore the contradictions, miss the opportunity to shine and hope that it will all blow over soon. Ironically it will be the same attitude as that of those Maltese gays who experience the same mild irritation as they decline the invitation to the annual Gay Pride march. Doing nothing changes nothing and remains the easiest way out. Never mind the killings. Never mind the suicides.

Renzo Piano’s challenge

Removing parliament to the site of the former Royal Opera House may be more appropriate than many people may think. Politics does provide us with endless entertainment. It has become an indigenous art form, a true cultural expression deserving the prominence of location as one enters our capital city.

Where else in the world would you expect to have our most prominent European politician, laying the ground for his European Parliament election campaign on the amazing discovery that Malta is dusty.

With their featherdusters in hand, Dr Busuttil’s fans must have been utterly charmed by his dashing defence of air quality in the final months of his tenure as MEP. In the company of all interested stakeholders whether NGOs, construction lobbies and health experts he discovered that Malta had been shockingly lax in living up to EU accession expectations. The fan club must have tut tutted in unison.

He reported in Wednesday’s Times that the amount of dust in the air is 37 times the amount permitted under EU rules. He seemed horrified. My heart began to bleed when he noted the human cost: chronic respiratory illness, educational deficit, long term productivity effects. It is all true.

The thing is that it has all been true for as long as anybody can remember. Dust pollution in Malta did not come into being since we joined the EU nor has there been any need for new legislation to suppress it. The legislation was in place long before Dr Busuttil was born. What has always been missing has been the will to do something about it. EU membership has made it possible to document the situation and to quantify the pollution level, that’s all. The political will to act and enforce was and is still missing.

The superb theatre, the uniquely Maltese political genre of theatre, comes to light in the bold championing of outraged health and ecological values by none other than Simon Busuttil. Since we are not all batty old crows, we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Was this not the same Dr Busuttil who in 2004 performed the Berlusconian transformation from Head of MIC and honest broker in the EU accession process to PN star candidate in the EP elections? Is he not still the PN’s main foothold in the European Parliament?

His political birth in 2004 may be a rather recent affair but even he must have noticed that the PN have been in government with only the slightest interruption since 1987. EU rules or no EU rules the dust has billowed unimpeded for decades under his party’s rule. Every government for the past 50 years has had the power and authority to suppress the pollution and has failed miserably. In fact no attempt has ever been made.

For the past 21 years or so the Dr Busuttil’s PN government colleagues have had every opportunity to begin to do something about the familiar outrage. They have done absolutely nothing to address the issue. On the contrary they have actively promoted the causes of dust pollution and strenuously denied the evidence. Does anybody recall then Environment Minister, Dr Francis Zammit Dimech, announcing that the dust was brown not grey and that we had no cause for concern? I do.

Mabel Strickland’s White Dust Case in Lija dating from the 1960s remains an all time classic. The cause and the pollution are still there today. Dust from building sites clogs culverts all over the country causing havoc at the first rains and annual expenses in damage to waterlogged roads and clean-up operations. Every hardstone quarry in the country is visible from space because of the long white plume of dust covering vast areas downwind of each site determined by the prevailing westerlies. Check it out on GoogleEarth. Did we need Dr Busuttil to tell us that the situation is nothing short of bizarre? And of all people, Dr Busuttil, a major divinity in the pantheon of champions of the status quo?

Political U-turns are performed everywhere. In Malta we have developed the technique to be able to do S-bends as we have on the divorce issue where we are here, there and everywhere at once. More than this, we have exceeded all competition by achieving simultaneous two-way travel. Dr Busuttil is devastating the reputation of his own party while taking credit for salutary change and bagging it as a political advantage to the same political party. Now that’s entertainment.

Renzo Piano has once more been given the irresistible challenge of expressing all this: a show of leading edge democracy and delight in the wealth of diversity as members of the EU balanced against a reality in which what is essentially a one-party state generates and digests internal dissidence while ignoring all else. Can he perform as well as our politicians?