Briefing the media on Saturday, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi urged journalists to compare his budget for 2006 with the one presented by the Labour administration in 1997, a budget which - he said - was riddled with taxes. What is truth, said sad Caesar?
Opposition Leader Alfred Sant has repeatedly charged Dr Gonzi with lying over the figures he gave in the budget speech regarding the economic and financial outturn in 2005. Asked on Bondi+ whether I agreed the PM was lying, I replied that one should not talk about lies, but about interpretation.
I am compelled to say that, in his reference to the Labour budget for 1997, Dr Gonzi was not interpreting: he was more economical with the truth than a miser with his miserable hoard.
As the then Minister of Finance I drew up and presented the budget for Labour's first full year in office after the 1996 election. I did so against a background which I have described on various occasions. It was never denied, except by some untruthful PN politicians.
Even before the Cabinet was sworn on, when I looked in at the Finance Ministry I found its top civil servants waiting to brief me. What they told me was stunning. The public finances were in shambles. The situation, it transpired, had been masked from the public.
I briefed Prime Minister Sant, and later the new Cabinet, and got on with the job. Some days later a totally apolitical civil servant replied to my puzzlement that the situation could have turned so bad so suddenly.
Not that suddenly, it turned out. He brought me a copy of a memorandum prepared for the Cabinet which my predecessor at Finance, John Dalli, had sent to the Prime Minister. The memo detailed the worsening financial position graphically. Some time later the PM called an election. No hint of the true financial situation was provided to the electorate. Instead, voters were repeatedly assured that money was no problem.
When I revealed the extent of the financial wreckage that was Labour's inheritance, the former Nationalist ministers, to their shame, denied responsibility. When I encountered former senior ministers over Christmas and, not without considerable anger, I spoke of the memo to the Cabinet, they told me they had not seen it.
That is the background. Perhaps Dr Gonzi is not fully aware of it. He was Speaker of the House at the time, and not involved in partisan politics. But he cannot be unaware of the figures I presented to the House of Representatives - he had become a Nationalist MP by then.
In my budget Speech (January 13, 1997) I said that for the first time in Malta's history, besides the fact that the public debt and debt guarantees exceeded Lm900 million, the Nationalist government had left behind a deficit even between ordinary revenue and expenditure (that is, before capital spending). Before taking into account some Lm30 million to service the national debt, that (primary) deficit exceeded Lm29 million.
The expenditure gap for 1996 had exploded to Lm132.8 million, I told the House, against the Lm54 million projected by the Nationalist government. Bringing to book foreign grants, the Labour government had inherited a deficit of Lm112 million - almost three times the Lm38.9 million forecast in the Nationalists' budget for 1996.
I announced new taxation. The bulk of the measures had been prepared by the budget team before the Nationalists were defeated in the October election. I gave them the go-ahead. I am on record as saying that they were not nearly enough. I should have been much bolder, to give a better start to the effort to save the sorry baby the Nationalists had sired.
To their discredit the Nationalist ministers thrown out by the electorate in 1996 never acknowledged parenthood. Dr Gonzi was not in that particular messy bed. He has, nevertheless, the same political blood line. For him to try to defocus journalists today by joining his DNA mates in distorting the truth of the bankruptcy they left behind them in 1996 is, I would still like to believe, no more than sign of how much he feels his back is against the wall.
It still does him no credit.