Sant promises to take up ombudsman suggestion on pensioners

Opposition leader Alfred Sant promised yesterday that a Labour government would take up a suggestion made by the ombudsman so that the tax bill of pensioners would not shoot up when they received pension arrears in a lump sum after their pension was wrongly computed by the Department of Social Services.

Speaking in parliament during the debate on the ombudsman, Mr Joe Sammut, Dr Sant also referred to cases about promotions in the armed forces investigated by the ombudsman. He said the way promotions were made in the AFM was shameful and the commanding officer would be made to answer for his actions when a Labour government took office.

At the beginning of his speech Dr Sant said he wanted to declare that his brother worked in the Office of the Ombudsman but he never discussed the ombudsman with him.

Dr Sant said he was puzzled at the hysterical way the government had reacted to the comments by the ombudsman in an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday on September 1.

The newspaper was hardly read and yet the government had exploded. Had the government not reacted, nobody would have noticed the interview.

It appeared the government viewed itself as untouchable, or felt undermined.

Yet the ombudsman had spoken with the voice of the people and the government should not therefore have been so arrogant in its reply.

The Speaker, as representative of parliament, should have spoken up in the face of such an arrogant attack because the ombudsman was an officer of the House.

The ombudsman had a duty to criticise the government and the government too had a right to criticise the ombudsman, but not in the arrogant manner it had adopted.

Indeed, rather than lynch the ombudsman, the government should have investigated the root of his complaints.

The ombudsman reflected on things the people felt. For giving voice to those feelings he was accused of being partisan.

He too had criticised points made by Mr Sammut in the interview, but had done so in a fair way, Dr Sant said. Mr Sammut had claimed all MPs ignored his recommendations and remarks, such as the way government agencies were not accountable for their spending. But opposition MPs had long been insisting on greater transparency in the operations of those agencies, Dr Sant said.

The government's hysterical reaction to the ombudsman's comments underlined the need for the ombudsman's office to be strengthened. The government, which was clearly in its last months, should not be allowed to gag the ombudsman for doing his job.

Democracy depended on checks and balances. The ordinary citizen, in particular, needed to be protected from the power of the administration and the ombudsman was the mechanism which should exist for that purpose.

Referring to the case raised by the ombudsman involving pensioners, Dr Sant said there had been many cases where pensioners had their pension wrongly computed, and then received a lump sum in arrears for several years. As a result, their tax bill shot up because the government was refusing to deduct the tax for every year when it was due. The ombudsman was right to say this was not fair on pensioners.

He had even suggested a way to solve this issue without creating too many administrative problems. A Labour government would take up his suggestion.

Turning to the ombudsman's remarks on the armed forces, Dr Sant said the unfair way in which promotions were given in the AFM was scandalous. The government was trying to hide everything, but a future Labour government would hold the brigadier to account. The ombudsman had been prudent and balanced in the way he tacked this issue.

The government's reaction showed how the situation in the country, particularly with regard to political discrimination, was going from bad to worse. This situation was worse than divisions such as those on the EU.

The same applied to the manner in which recruitment and promotions were made at Air Malta.

Unfortunately, a Labour government would now face pressure for opposite measures to be taken. The ombudsman was saying such a situation should not continue.

Concluding, Dr Sant said the ombudsman had spoken in the manner he did out of a sense of duty to call a spade a spade. To criticise the government was not a sacrilege. The government had tried to intimidate the ombudsman and his staff in what amounted to moral violence.

What was needed now was to devise ways to protect the institution and others which were similar to it, such as the office of the auditor-general, which could face similar pressures.

He felt the office of the ombudsman should be entrenched in the constitution, as the ombudsman himself had suggested, and that parliament as a whole, and not just a House committee, should debate the workings of the ombudsman at least in two sittings every year, with the ombudsman being given the opportunity to intervene.

Dr Sant said he felt the ombudsman should be given a higher status in the official protocol list.

Dr Sant said he wished to express solidarity with the ombudsman. The opposition viewed the points he had raised as serious, even though it disagreed with the way in which he had generalised when he referred to MPs. The opposition viewed the government's reaction as unacceptable and symptomatic of a sick society where decisions where taken on the basis of "friends of friends".

Other speakers will be reported tomorrow.