In Two Minds

The PN campaign song about togetherness is almost frightening. It is not about being together with others but about being together alone. To promote a single party government as togetherness is the height of exclusion. It is the ultimate expression of our political duality.

To those singing and to those to whom the song is addressed the limits of the universe stand within the PN. It is the only way that they can romanticise togetherness in the middle of a bitter contest for power against their adversaries whom they claim to despise.

It makes my hair stand on end to hear it. Now I have had my fill of political propaganda these last 18 years. I feel that I have heard it all before. I am a jaded politician myself but this form of “togetherness” gives me the creeps.

It is exactly the opposite of togetherness. It is the inward looking political pathology that makes a political party sufficient unto itself, detached from the rest of the country in which it operates. No doubt the Labour party suffers from the same syndrome. I have constant experience of two realities in the same space existing quite separately from one another.

If all your friends are blue or all your friends are red, you may already have fallen victim to it. You are at least exposed to it. Thankfully most people and particularly young people have developed immunity for political dualism. They are able to change their minds and are proud of the fact. They resent being politically labeled and their friends are their friends, period. They are the future.

For healthy people togetherness implies being with others and not a concentration of the like minded to the exclusion of all others. Today people enjoy diversity and they can cope with it easily. They can support a party on one issue and its adversary on another. They can turn up at a protest without promising their eternal political soul to the organizers. They can keep all political parties on their toes.

In the bad old days Labour Ministers stood on trucks in their singlets and shouted: “All we have is for Labourites, what remains is for Labourites and if Nationalists want a share they must become Labourites” Exclusion politics fully expressed. Nobody could be so brutal today. Instead we have a song about togetherness, a togetherness that excludes instead of embracing diversity.

The only thing that scares me more is that the people promoting and enjoying this “togetherness” have no insight of their political pathology. So what else is new?

A Million (Wo)Man Years

In a study carried out across the EU it is estimated that it will take a million (wo)man years to achieve compliance with the new regulations on the energy efficiency of properties. It means jobs and work for whoever wants it. It means money and money well spent on salaries and materials which insulate not only against heat and cold but also against the rising cost of energy.

Malta also has its share. It also has much, much more. With over 192,000 properties 40% of which require significant repairs, how many man or woman years would it take to get them up to scratch? It is not my field to make such estimates but just one look around me tells me that nobody in the construction industry will ever be out of a job if we ever get going.

It is clearly our future. With a surplus of 53,000 properties which can never be occupied because we would not be able to withstand the influx of 100,000 and never be able to supply them with basic water and electricity services, new building is bound to be reduced to an absolute minimum in the very near future.

Ironically the shift from new construction to maintenance and restoration was the express policy of a Nationalist Minister: Michael Falzon in 1988. Nothing serious was ever done about it. We continued to expand greenfield take up right up to the bizarre extension of development zones in 2006. Or was this the plan, to drive the country far over sustainable limits until the shift to restoration and maintenance becomes inevitable? What a way to govern a country?

Bil-Vot Tieghek il-Bidla

Have a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8YXTEwBTNM

A Quick Word

This morning I was stopped by a stranger while going about my business in Valletta. He wanted to thank the Greens for the service we give the country. In 18 years nobody has been so clear. It took me completely by surprise.

I was busy. My mind was far from politics. It was almost a shock to be told in one or two short sentences that somebody has understood not only our message but also our motivation. It is usually “I like the way you talk” or “You have it right on this or that issue”. This was a “Thank you” and not on any particular or personal service.

What this stranger cannot possibly understand is that it is his encouragement that keeps us going. Let’s face it: if one is in politics for gratitude perhaps a visit to a shrink is called for. We do not expect gratitude for doing what we consider to be everybody’s duty.

Precisely because we do not ask for it, an expression of appreciation is embarrassingly welcome. More than that there is the joy of meeting minds, the mutual recognition of people who have gone beyond the fear and mental blackmail of the two-party dilemma.

That laconic “Thank you” spoke volumes about the need for change, a change of system and not merely an alternation of one-party governments. There was no need for lengthy explanations.

Leave All Hope Behind

The most commented news item on the Times website in the past week was the report of a female traffic warden cleared of a charge of posing naked in public. The comments reveal that some of us are not as batty as our legal system. All of them pour scorn on this prosecution.

It all adds spice to our next traffic fine since we can now speculate that we are being penalized by a wannabe porn star. Withholding her name from publication only adds mystery and possibly infuriates more of her colleagues who may not be as inclined to display their birthday suits.

Pity that my latest day in court was not so amusing. I was there on a rare visit as counsel to a witness in a prosecution of a bar owner for playing infernally loud music in the small hours of the morning. It meant that I heard all other loud music cases bundled together for that morning’s sitting.

It was a rout for the prosecution. In every case a Malta Tourism Authority official swore that according to the license conditions in his file these people had no permit to disturb the neighbourhood. The Police also raised the general rule against loud noises after 11.00 pm. Then defence raised the issue of the original licenses issued by the police a record of which may not have been transferred to the MTA. A minute doubt was sown that these establishments may somehow have been given a permit sometime in the past.

They were all acquitted. It seemed like nonsense to me. The court made monkeys of the police. The neighbours who had plucked up courage to report the Mafiosi who run these joints had been thrown out of court more naked than our beloved warden. Will they ever try again? Will the police waste their time again?

The court claims to be powerless. The police are impotent and the site neighbours are mocked by the system. Some clever dick somewhere has figured a way to sabotage almost any prosecution by ensuring that the MTA records cannot be certified as complete. In this way the system appears to work or grind its way slowly forward through reports at police stations and appearances in court but in fact nothing will ever be done to address neighbours’ complaints. The mysterious operator of the system has figured out a way to give everybody a non-answer and to keep the Mafiosi more than satisfied.

My client has made the mistake of buying a flat for Lm85,000 over the neighbours from hell. There is no way out.

Cultural Diplomacy

I was in Edinburgh for just over 24 hours with just enough time to walk down a street or two, have a taste of haggis and experience the biting January cold for myself. The trip was gift from the British Council Scotland which invited me and two other delegates from Malta, Giovanni Buttigieg and Carmen Sammut to discuss “Scotland’s place in the world” in a one day seminar attended by guests from a multitude of small countries.

Devolution in Scotland has meant more than a realization of a national identity. That was always there. The Scots want to develop their relationship with the rest of the world, with the community of nations. They also want to get beyond the stereotypes of kilts, scotch, shortbread and Highland games. There is much more to Scotland.

Certainly it is no mean thing that the first note from a bagpipe anywhere in the world instantly recalls everything Scottish to millions with a Scottish connection and otherwise. Still there is so much more which Scotland can make available to the rest of us in science and engineering, in the arts and in business.

The outreach to Armenians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs as well as to Maltese may itself be a measure of the Scottish willingness to explore other realities, to learn from them and build new bonds. It was all about cultural diplomacy, about going beyond interdependency to interconnectedness. All small countries have a lot to learn.

I came home turning over all I had heard and discussed in my head. It was stimulating to apply it to Malta’s case, to explore all the potential as yet untapped. Who will begin to do so? How? There is no Maltese cultural institute to interface with the British Council, the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institut. Perhaps there should be. Our potential as a venue for cultural debate and developing interconnectedness in our region is out of all proportion to our size. It is all there for the taking.

NO Greens, NO Governance

Most people have never forked out a cent to any political party and would not dream of doing so. They may feel that they get it all for free and wish that they did not get it at all. In fact they pay through their noses and never get a receipt.

Interviewed in 2003 Joe Saliba PN Secretary General, estimated that his party had spent around Lm480,000 on the general election campaign. Thousands must have thought that it was a glorious waste of money and guesstimated that the MLP had spent a similar fortune. A mass meeting five years ago would put the PN back by Lm10,000. The MLP must be forking out similar amounts in such events.

To most innocent bystanders it does not mean much at first glance. Who cares? Perhaps we should. Election campaign expenses are only the tip of the iceberg. The expenses between elections are no joke either. Where does it all come from? Time and again we are told that party businesses, subscription fees and the generous donations in the pre-Christmas TV extravaganzas cover it all.

If it had all been clear and above board as Joe Saliba has insisted, why has Lawrence Gonzi promised a law regulating the financing of political parties, to take effect maybe, sometime in the next legislature? And why not before the election?

Politics as a whole has nosedived in the popularity polls and donations from eager partisans must be getting ever more scarce leaving the parties exposed to donors who expect something in return for the hefty amounts they advance.

While Malta remains one of very few countries with a claim to democratic institutions that still does not regulate the financing of political parties, the major donors remain shy about their generosity. While other countries have had scandals of all sorts exposed, Malta does not even have a law to be broken. And still the donors do not boast of their openhandedness.

Some people are irritated when they receive mail from Ministers in government envelopes which are little more than state subsidized canvassing. Others realize that several state advertising campaigns costing tens of thousands are a free ride taken by the party in government at taxpayers’ expense. Did we really need to advertise the new state hospital to such an extent? Was there any danger of it losing our business? All this is just small potatoes.

When a road is not finished in a reasonable time, if the cost overruns are systematic and huge, it must be awkward for a government minister to come down like a ton of bricks on a generous donor to his party. How about planning permits? The choice of plant and equipment? Which policies are influenced by whom? Which reforms are delayed in order not to cause discomfort to which loyal enterprise? We may never know. We can never be sure either way.

However, as long as it remains within the legitimate options of anybody with deep pockets to buy out a political party, we would be unwise and indeed naïve not to suspect the worst. Such suspicions are strengthened by the poor quality of our urban environment and the constant threat under which what remains of our rural environment survives. The cost of cost-free politics is, very probably, simply hideous.

No matter which political party assumes power as a one-party government following the 2008 election, unless the system is radically changed, we will continue to pay through our noses. We will continue to be annoyed by all the systems that do not work as they should and not even begin to guess why not. Nobody will ever begin to assess the cost of this dominant, covert anti-system.

My guess is that if donations and loans to political parties above a certain amount were to be made public, very many things would change. Above all many of the numerous spanners in the works would be pulled out. The taxpayer would make a huge bargain.

In all likelihood we would then have our first party financing scandal some time in the future. While we may poke fun at Italians for their tangentopoli and mani pulite sandals, at the Germans and French for the Kohl-Mitterand debacle or at the British for their cash-for-ermine comedy, we are being robbed blind. The availability of all government systems to ordinary citizens is significantly reduced. We can never achieve our full potential relying on a mechanism which is necessarily warped.

Alternattiva Demokratika – The Green Party has demanded a law on the financing of political parties at least since 1992. Until very recently the only result was an increase in the expenditure allowed to election candidates making their returns of expenditure following every election less of an insolent joke. Following previous elections AD candidates refused to file a return in protest at the blatant falsehood of sworn returns passively accepted by the Electoral Commission. We were duly prosecuted.

On the eve of the 2008 election Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi has promised us all a law on the financing of political parties if he is elected to the post he holds and when he is moved to keep his word. What exactly he proposes is not clear. Going on previous reforms in the field he may legitimate the present system and claim that it has been regulated.

The big question is why has he chosen to adopt a crucial reform proposal made by the Greens almost two decades ago, only now? Why not six months ago? Why not on his taking office to inaugurate a new era in Maltese politics? Would it be embarrassing to have to divulge all the obligations his party may have taken on in view of the next round of elections? For at least the next five years the effect of such obligations will continue to take their toll whether or not an effective regulation of party financing sees the light of day.

This election will produce a government under the influence of the present system just as the one before it and the one before that and so on in unbroken sequence. The undocumented but harrowing cost will continue. Regardless of all the fanfare and the mass enthusiasm, the rousing speeches and the fun filled events, ordinary citizens will continue to be robbed of the full effect of their tax money, and our governments, of whichever hue they happen to be, will continue to fall short of their full potential. That much is a certainty.

What remains in doubt is whether the PN adoption of the Green proposal to come clean on party financing will ever take effective shape. How likely is it that a government under the influence can legislate effectively to rid itself of the shackles it is now begging for? How likely is it that the matter will even be raised in parliament without the full force of Green prodding?

Our campaign on the joint issues of rent reform and property prices including the ongoing referendum campaign has been effectively resisted by government. Not being able to stonewall completely as it is did prior to 2003, the government promised a White Paper which is now 2 years past its due-by date. Without Greens in government making such reforms necessarily part of a government programme agreed in coalition talks, we will have waffle and promises on good governance as we have had on rent reform. With Greens in government, we will find out what the cost has been and finally put an end to it.