Electoral boundaries

Labour leader Alfred Sant yesterday said that agreement between the parties has been reached on the long-running saga of electoral districts, which would lead to Gozo being considered as an electoral district in its entirety.

However, the issue was thrown into doubt again last night when Nationalist Party deputy leader Tonio Borg said he had not been informed of such an agreement.

Dr Sant referred to the matter of electoral boundaries when he addressed party supporters in Hamrun. Afterwards, asked by The Times whether agreement between the parties had been reached, he answered "Yes", without, however, giving further details.

Dr Sant had earlier told the meeting that Labour was in favour of Gozo being one district as long as no changes were made to the electoral boundaries in Malta before the next election.

The Labour Party, he said, has also agreed on the issue of proportionality - if only two political parties were elected to Parliament and the number of seats gained by one of them did not reflect the proportion of its votes won nationally, its seat allocation would be increased to reflect votes.

Dr Borg told The Times later that he knew that talks on proportionality were supposed to continue. However, he said the PN was against a proposal by Labour on the issue since it destroyed all possibilities of a coalition. Labour's proposal, he said, was that if a party gained at least 45 per cent of the votes, its seat allocation would be increased to enable it to govern.

He said that if Labour gave up this proposal, there was a chance of reaching agreement on proportionality. If this was done, agreement would also be reached on Gozo remaining a single district.

In July of last year, the Electoral Commission announced that Ghajnsielem would be severed from the 13th district - Gozo - as the electoral register of the previous April had seen the population of Gozo registered at 25,388, exceeding the electoral quota by 7.74 per cent when the variation can only be a maximum of five per cent.

In May, a Bill was published proposing to amend the Constitution so that Gozo would not be divided when the electoral districts are drawn up.

In July, the Opposition voted against the Bill in its second reading. The Labour leader had argued in favour of Gozo being united as one electoral district but had claimed that Gozo was being used by the government as an excuse to achieve other political aims.

The fear was that the transfer of Ghajnsielem from the 12th district back to the 13th could trigger a change in the rest of the district boundaries when this was not required, Dr Sant had said.

Amendments were due to be proposed by both the government and the opposition at committee stage, but the debate at this level has not yet started in the hope that agreement between the parties can be reached.