Maltese roulette

What is impelling the government to renew, two years before it expires, the lease of the 16th century premises that house the Casinò Maltese, in Valletta and to do so at the ridiculous ground rent of Lm3,000 annually, which will barely secure 100 square metres of office space in the property market? This incredible proposal is included in a resolution debated in the audit committee of the House of Representatives last week.

The large, beautiful premises once served as the Treasury of the Knights of St John. The government would have been expected to be drawing up plans to take back the premises when the lease expired. It could offer Casinò Maltese society an alternative site elsewhere in Valletta.

The building in Republic Street is ideal as an adjunct to the House of Representatives, housed in the President's Palace 20 metres down the road. There are increasing complaints that backbench members of parliament do not have adequate space inside the House premises to allow them to carry out their back-office work. For decades there has been talking of relocating the House. The prime minister restated this when The Times interviewed him recently.

The PM gave another reason why he feels parliament should move from the President's Palace. He said that the current location of the House of Representatives confuses the function of the President with that of parliament. That holds as much water as a sieve. We do not have an executive head of state. And it is hardly the case that our ceremonial head and the republic's legislators should not cross each other's path on rare occasion in the historic centre piece of Valletta.

Others propose a change of venue for the House on the grounds of democratic perception. The oblong, confronting-sides structure of the present House chamber, where the government and the Opposition literally and physically face each other, is at times indicated as contributing to belligerence in debate. Some suggest that a semi-circular arrangement would not be as symbolically divisive and could encourage less heated debate.

From my own parliamentary experience in both chambers, the present location does convey a deeper perception of divide than the Tapestry Chamber, where the House used to meet until 1976. That does not mean there was less confrontation and division therein. Nor is it proven that semi-circular chambers inhibit overheated debate, wild, howled accusations, jumping over the benches and also fisticuffs. Even without the public deficit on their back, Maltese taxpayers, one should think, could do without spending several million liri on new premises to house the republic's parliament and its support offices.

That does mean MPs should have to continue to put up with an unnecessary denial of decent if compact office space. Which is where the present Casinò Maltese building comes into the picture. It should be explored for a contribution towards a reasonable solution that would not necessitate massive new spending. One way to do it could be to relocate in it the offices which ministers, parliamentary secretaries and their staff occupy in the present House area in the Palace, to free them for backbench MPs.

If not that, this substantial public asset could be used for other purposes of national import, rather than extending it on a renewed lease to the Casinò Maltese for less than a bad song. As an opposition member of the audit committee observed, the rent in 1906 was already set at £1,400. I do not know by how much the cost-of-living had risen over the following 40 years, but I'd be surprised if it was less than the six-and-a-half fold increase from the 1946 base of the Retail Price Index to 2002. Should the government propose a revision of the ground rent in line with estimated inflation since 1906, that too would only raise the ground rent to around a relatively meagre Lm17,000 annually.

The government is not being charitable towards a socially worthy cause with the people's money. It is simply throwing away a national asset. To compound the error of its ways it has not even linked the pitiful "revised" ground rent to the retail price index but proposes to adjust it up by five per cent every five years - against 10, say, for the Attard Girls Guides. That contrasts too with evolving policy on rents charged to residents in government-owned flats, for instance.

This is Maltese roulette that shoots the interests of the public purse in the head. Why, exactly? The holders of the Knights' purse in their Old Treasury must be turning in their graves.