Seeking to avoid consensus

In his succinct, almost telegraphic, style Lino Spiteri touched on a number of crucial issues in "Simplicity and broad beans" (November 15). He touches upon the Prime Minister's strenuous efforts to project himself as a decisive leader, the pretensions of the MCESD and the inevitable fact that at the end of it all it is for the government to decide and eventually to bear the electoral consequences.

It is hard to quarrel with most of this but there is more to be said. Apart from countering the contrast with the contender in his race for the premiership, Lawrence Gonzi has a need to put his own stamp on his Parliament. In posing as the great decision maker he has a twofold target: he underscores the process of reform as his own and detaches it from the previous Nationalist period.

It is a supreme exercise in collegial Bundyism through which his Cabinet claims to be different from itself as the previous Nationalist cabinets and Dr Gonzi is erected as an Easter Island icon in time for the next election. It is his party's need and that always comes first.

Decisive or not, decisions must be made. With so many reforms delayed beyond tolerance because of earlier electoral expedience, the Gonzi era will, of necessity, be a period of reform.

Dr Gonzi's relationship with civil society within the MCESD should be part of the reform. It is a mechanism intended to provide a forum for civil society, a place for common challenges to be addressed together and divergent interests to be redirected towards a common goal. It is and will remain a consultative body.

The loss of their confidence is a serious loss to any government and especially to a government obliged to embark upon epochal reforms. Disregarding them robs them of the will to work for consensus. It robs us all of the ability to address the issues before us with our full potential. The failure to appreciate the value of consensus beyond its use in political rhetoric could be the Gonzi government's greatest failure.

All parties concerned are involved in a work in progress. This government is heir to a political culture unused to submitting to advice and consultation. The social partners are still feeling their way towards conflict resolution through discussion. The difficulties are immense, not least the expected resistance of their memberships to any concession that must be made. The members of civil society organisations are on a learning curve also. How soon can they be made to internalise the conviction that their representatives on the MCESD have a national as well as a sectoral responsibility? The defeat of the MCESD by the government throws back any such process by several years. It is a lot to lose.

Contrary to what Mr Spiteri seemed to imply, the MCESD has a right to demand a say on rates of taxation and public expenditure. The MCESD is not stepping outside its remit in talking about this. If taxation and government expenditure are omitted from a carefully hammered out social pact, nothing is secured. Without it no social pact can gel. Nothing can be binding: the value of a truce in favour of economic development is instantly squandered. Nobody will believe it. What point will there be to submitting to a pact to restrain payroll costs if government expenditure and taxation continue to climb through the roof? What happens to investor confidence?

The Prime Minister must decide whether he wants the benefit of cooperation from the social partners or not. It is his choice. He cannot have the cake and eat it. The establishment of a body such as the MCESD was undoubtedly an important political development, a major positive change to aid the decision making process. It cannot be ignored, it cannot be rendered useless without denying this political change and incurring the cost of delay and disappointment.

Although Alternattiva Demokratika accepted the Prime Minister's informal invitation to attend MCESD meetings, no formal invitation has ever been made. It appears that the government is satisfied that the Labour Party continues to give the matter the cold shoulder and provides the government with an opportunity to complain at Labour's failure to cooperate. It is probably yet another exercise in two-party posturing.

There are some items which we would have loved to place on the MCESD agenda, rent law reform to mention just one. Bringing Lm1,000 million worth of properties back into the country's economic life should be a matter of general interest. Reducing the upward pressure on wages from property prices should be another. How about the pressure of housing and commercial property costs on our tourism product costs? How about easing pressure on the Maltese property bubble? Are 60 years of indecision not yet enough?

With the exclusion of other political parties, the Prime Minister's own presence at MCESD is still justified in the role of representative of the government of Malta, to provide the most authoritative liaison possible between civil society and the government, carefully avoiding a partisan stance. Difficult? Impossible?

It does not help at all that the Prime Minister is also the major icon of the Nationalist Party. His Sunday television and partisan exploits have a devastating effect on the new process. They are old politics denying the array of political developments assumed by EU membership and demanded by those who brought it about.

It is far too simple to say that the Prime Minister should go ahead and govern with only the threat of an electoral rap at the end of his term as the sole check on his performance. We should have developed further by now. Maltese politics should have produced something better than sequential and semi-paralysed dictatorships subject only to a five-second interruption while we drop our ballot papers. We should have developed a refined sensitivity in synthesising our kaleidoscopic and divergent interests also between elections. Perhaps a modicum of mutual respect also.

We have not. The opposition is constantly and institutionally cornered into being consistently negative. It is what the government wants. It is what the government gets. Sometimes the opposition provides a bonus through populist, opportunistic negativism. Yes, it is the Mintoffian legacy which consumes both our rivals. It is the same when they swap roles.

The proof is that the Prime Minister does not try the same trick with the Greens. He knows that we will respond positively. We always have. We have always stood outside the two-party stereotype. He evidently does not really want any positive response to erode the majoritarian, totalitarising, monopolistic, two-party siege mentality.

What we get are the Prime Minister's Sunday sermons at party clubs. We still have the budget preview turned into a party panegyric on the party media. We still have no balanced broadcasting. No authentic debate. Our rivals are still reinforcing the bi-partisan confrontation while talking of consultation and consensus. The Greens are watching, all 23,000 of us, mostly in disgust.

We are not alone. While Greens renew their commitment regardless of the hurdles they face, others are giving up on politics, on democracy: 54,000 of them refused to vote in the last election. It will take more than smart, short-term tricks to recover them, to make them believe that common action is worthwhile.

The country needs unity more than ever before. Never before has it been so clear that two party politics is a zero-sum game, an intolerable extravagance. Never before were the opportunities for cohesion so close, so clear, so urgent and never so wantonly squandered.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

harry.vassallo@alternattiva.org.mt