Politics can be fun, if also worrying

Article published in the Malta Independent on Sunday on 06 November 2011 Were we really waiting with bated breath to see the outcome on the debate in Parliament on Friday evening? I would have thought the outcome was predictable. Excepting for Franco Debono, the rest of the PN MPs would obey their Whip and the Speaker was certainly not going to go against his party by casting his crucial vote in favour of the LP motion asking for Austin Gatt’s resignation. However, there is no doubt that there were some anxieties harboured by Gatt’s hangers on. There are still a few loose components in the PN machine and although they stuck by their party last night, things are not running smoothly, hence the Prime Minister’s request for a motion for a vote of confidence in his government. The protest on the public transport flop would also have left its mark. Dr Gonzi needs to rein in his disgruntled MPs and a vote of confidence will mean that they will have to make a decision on whether they want to stay in his party and toe the line, or not. Not an easy decision to make. They obviously have political ambitions and crossing the floor is no guarantee that their objectives will be reached. Basically, they have nowhere to go. By yesterday morning, Dr Gonzi had still not decided on whether Franco Debono, who seems to be the only one as ballsy as Austin Gatt in the PN, will be asked to relinquish his post of Parliamentary Assistant at the Office of the Prime Minister. Dr Debono has said that he will favour the vote of confidence in his party’s government. He managed to get a 50-minute allocation for his speech instead of five in yesterday’s debate, which was a wise decision. We had to be shown that we at least have some democracy left. His main point was that Minister Gatt should shoulder his responsibility for the public transport fiasco. The Prime Minister had fielded that point earlier by issuing a statement saying that the buck stopped with him and that the whole Cabinet was responsible for the reform. Maybe, but the Prime Minister and the Cabinet were not responsible for the implementation and that is the crux of the matter. The reform took three years of planning, yet no one seemed to realise that the buses we would get were too cumbersome for our roads. I was driving behind three of them in Rudolph Street next to the Imperial Hotel, in Sliema, the other day and hoping an ambulance, or any other emergency service, would not need access. But I digress and anyway commuters are more concerned with the bad service then the size of the buses. Of course we needed the reform and yes we have got rid of the awful emissions, shabby buses and some really rude and aggressive drivers. But the alternative has proved a disaster in the very late arrivals, overlong journeys and complicated routes not to mention the ticketing letdown. Gatt now claims it is all Arriva’s fault, (even after that company’s CEO issued a statement earlier praising the minister) and has not accepted the resignations of the Transport Malta’s chairman and CEO. What a farce. An important point in Dr Debono’s speech ending, directed at the Prime Minister, was not related to Minister Gatt, well not directly, or to the public transport reform, but to our Public Broadcasting Service. He might not have used the right analogy by comparing it to the 1980s. But he does have a point; our national TV station is seen as anything but national. A lot was said about democracy at the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the first sitting of the legislative assembly on Wednesday. However, despite all the speeches for strengthening democracy, I am sure I am not the only one to be anything but convinced that some of the parliamentarians mean it. The Speaker, Michael Frendo, proposed the reactivation of the select committee on the strengthening of democracy, which the Prime Minister said he had proposed to be set up three years ago. “The Select Committee was, and remained, the best forum for strengthening democracy,” he maintained. He said that although there had been unanimous approval in the House, the Opposition withdrew from this committee 18 months ago. Well, as far as I remember, the reason the Opposition withdrew was because it felt that democracy was not being upheld in the way the Public Accounts Committee was dealing with the Power Station saga. In fact, Joseph Muscat referred to the PAC in his speech: “The rules regulating the Public Accounts Committee should also be amended so that if a minister, responsible for a particular entity, presided over such committee would give up his place during such hearing.” The Power Station PAC debate, which has just resumed, had kept being postponed and I believe was last postponed sine die in October last year, after the Opposition had asked for a Speaker’s ruling on the calling of witnesses. The governments’ representatives on the Committee had voted against the calling of witnesses. “Whoever heard of an investigative committee not calling crucial witnesses? One might as well dissolve the PAC the way things are going. Do we need another useless ‘watchdog’? Why do I get the feeling we are being taken for a ride? Our watchdogs, not just the PAC, are either being kept on a leash too tight to function, or are slumbering in complacency. “Minister Austin Gatt, who was the one to object to the calling of witnesses, should not even have been sitting in on this debate, since the power station came under his portfolio at the time the contract was being worked on and finalised. If anything, he should be summoned to give evidence,” I had opined in a column in October 2010. It was certainly undemocratic for a minister involved to be part of an investigative committee of a contract, which a Times editorial (24 April 2010) had referred to as having been handled in an “unacceptably sloppy way” and that there was “sufficient evidence of bad public governance to send shivers down the spine of many hard working taxpayers who have to bear the cost of such laxness”. In my October article and another earlier one, “It will not go away”, of 2 May last year, I had mentioned that although our PAC structure is based on the UK’s Public Accounts Committee, Cabinet ministers in the UK are expressly excluded from sitting on the PAC. Here, Ministers Tonio Fenech and Austin Gatt were on the PAC and would be voting on the outcome. So it looks like a fait accompli, I had opined. The PAC is composed of four members from government and three members from the Opposition including the chairman who does not have a casting vote. How can the PAC effectively scrutinise the workings of government with two Cabinet ministers and two other government MPs on the committee and only three Opposition members, including the chairman who does not have a casting vote? Now the PAC is finally questioning the witnesses Minister Gatt had objected to and he is still a very active participant on the committee. But let’s get back to the Prime Minister’s speech, which rather baffled me because on the one hand he said: “Democratic institutions had to be strengthened to ensure they were responding to the peoples’ needs and dealing with the real priorities.” Yet, on the other he cited “populism, which was again rearing its ugly head,” as “the enemy”. Now maybe the Maltese version of populism has a different meaning to the English one. As far as I know, Populism is a political philosophy, which advocates the rights and interests of ordinary people. But according to the Prime Minister, it apparently means, “irresponsibly offered half truths and simplistic arguments which appealed to everyone’s negative sentiments”.