Wrong rent laws, right referendum, right time

In recent days there have been suggestions that Alternattiva Demokratika chairman Dr Harry Vassallo retire from public life and lock himself away somewhere with a giant calculator, totting up the numbers of landlords who will support his party's referendum to abrogate the rent laws. Then, when he is certain that the group of aggrieved landlords far outnumbers their protected tenants, he can proceed with the referendum campaign.

According to the exponents of this point of view, this is the only "safe" option for the landlords, who want to bring about some form of change. These so-called pragmatists warn that a negative referendum result is potentially catastrophic for landlords, as the government will simply wave the referendum result in their face, and say that it is bowing down to the will of the people. What tosh.

The very same people who warn about the consequences of a negative referendum vote then go on to say that in any case a referendum is an exercise in futility because the government has a rent reform bun in the oven. And they can't see how contradictory those two statements are.

We have been assured by Minister Dolores Cristina that several working groups have been as busy as bees to study the matter holistically and to come up with a reform package which balances the rights of landlords and tenants. Apparently this matter has not been addressed before because the Nationalist government is a one-issue party, and for the last decade that issue has been entry into the EU.

In any case, Minister Cristina informs us that a law is in the pipeline, that the machinery of government is working towards this end, with a White Paper tentatively due in February (?) next year. The Prime Minister too, has gone on record saying that change is round the corner and that the matter is to be discussed at Cabinet level imminently.

Would he have us believe that the findings of these working groups and his government's rent reform package are to be screwed up into so many paper balls, and binned, in the event of a negative referendum result? If that is the case, we'd be very hard-pressed to believe that the government really has any serious plans to right this wrong. We'd be much more inclined to think that the Nationalist Party in government and the Labour Party which continues to sit pretty, have reached an implicit understanding to procrastinate and waffle about the issue, until some other matter captures the collective imagination.

Such an understanding is no novelty in the Maltese political scene. Both major political parties regularly evade issues which might cost them votes - vide their utter humiliation at the hands of a handful of bullies-cum-hunters. A high-ranking Nationalist remarked: "That's politics. It's an exercise in pragmatism." The rest of us have another word for it, and that's "pathetic".

Landlords, their families and generally anyone who has an interest in having the unjust rent laws abrogated, can go ahead and cast their vote, secure in the knowledge that they are finally voicing their concerns. If the government reneges on its commitment to reform the laws, the penny would have finally dropped. Government's bluff would have been called, its rent reform package as elusive as the key to the Da Vinci Code, and the run-up to it much less entertaining.

Should the government decide to finally address the issue and produce a White Paper on rent reform, pre-empting the need for a referendum, so much the better. The referendum campaign would have been successful in more ways than one. Besides having the rent issue fast-tracked to the top of the agenda of a government more usually concerned with needless constitutional tinkering, landlords will realise that they, and other citizens like them, can influence government in its inter-election rule. They will be relieved to find out that they are not like children - who are to be seen and not heard... except once every five years.