When Lawrence Gonzi presented Budget 2008, he  detailed estimates of what the measures he announced would cost. He wore no magician's robes and there were no white rabbits appearing from a threadbare top hat, but even without that costume he doubled the amount that parents would receive in allowances for every child under 16, improved pensions and lowered income tax through the mechanism of revised tax bands and higher thresholds. He spelt out a capital and recurrent expenditure programme involving a massive investment in education and health, the island's road network, tourism and the environment. Facts and figures.

When it was the turn of the Opposition leader to reply to the Budget, he came up with his own set of promises. These included a halving of the surcharge, abolishing tax on overtime work, the holidays issue (less productivity) and other carrots he dangled before the electorate's eyes.

Fair enough. But the question instinctively asks itself: what will it cost? I understand that on a television programme, the Opposition's deputy leader declined to take up the gauntlet thrown at his feet by the parliamentary secretary responsible for finance. He failed to tell viewers how the promises his leader made would be met in fiscal terms.

The Government side is saying that Labour's pledges will cost the Exchequer Lm115 million. This fledgling amount will presumably be balanced out by taxes, overt or covert. Said deputy leader accused the Government of an economic frame-up. The turn of phrase is nippy, but it leaves us in the dark on a subject that demands light. Point is it behoves the Opposition to come up with an answer because the absence of one will become a major feature in the election campaign. If you sound as if the measures you have in mind are a panic reaction to an infuriatingly well rounded Budget, it makes for desperate times later on.

Desperate times - desperate remarks

I hope Labour's health spokesman crawls further back into the shadows after the infelicitous remarks he passed about procedures, or the lack of them, carried out by Albert Fenech at Mater Dei Hospital last Monday. That the spokesman for the Labour Party on health is also a doctor made his intrusion all the more picaresque. Witness his roguish remark that things should be done seriously and without endangering the health of patients for "ulterior" motives.

What is it that gets into a doctor-politician's mind when the urge to score a cheap point on the business of health (and, incidentally, fail to score one) overcomes his first duty to avoid creating alarm in that sector? When Dr Farrugia claimed that all the necessary precautions had not been taken during the first surgical intervention at the new hospital, he did nothing less than call into question Prof. Fenech's professionalism. The cardiac specialist nailed Dr Farrugia swiftly and neatly. The headlines in Thursday's editions of The Times and The Malta Independent used 'blasts' and 'slams' respectively in their story to describe Mr Fenech's reaction. "It would have been better for whoever made these allegations not to undermine their natural intelligence and integrity by making cheap, politically-based allegations based on misinformation." Game.

That was not enough for a man whose professional integrity is a household word. "Throughout my career I have worked in the best hospitals in the UK and the US. There are no surgical theatres on standby in these hospitals during coronary angiogram procedures". There had been none on standby during the 2,200 coronary angiograms performed every year for the past 12 years at St Luke's. Set.

And for his final rally: "I am proud of the safety record of my department and  challenge anyone to produce figures concerning safety, efficiency and professionalism that are better than those experienced locally." Match.

Dr Farrugia also took a swipe at the migration process and claimed that "defects and lack of serious preparations in the hospital design were becoming apparent". And there we were, thinking that his boss, Dr Sant, had pronounced the place "state of the art". It is said that Opposition parties do not win elections; Governments lose them. The evidence is growing in Malta that the reverse can also be true.

Broken societies

It is an interesting feature of the British political scene that marriage is starting to stake a claim on what has been described as 'the new moral high ground' in politics. There is a general consensus in the UK that the past five decades have created a broken society in which the consequences of family breakdowns have become all too evident. Earlier this year, the Social Justice Commission headed by the ex-leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, came up with a report that carried 190 recommendations for tackling the social decay that is taking place in Britain.

Anybody interested can log on to www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/writersforum. The Centre for Social Justice has since published some key and harrowing statistics. In a paper on family breakdown, Samantha Callan, who was the keynote speaker at a national conference on healthy marriages organised by the Cana Movement and Caritas, wrote, with substantial research to back her figures, that if you have experienced family breakdown, you are 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to be a drug addict, 50 per cent more likely to have alcohol problems, 40 per cent more likely to have serious debt problems, and 35 per cent more likely to be unemployed.

Furthermore, 70 per cent of young offenders come from lone-parent families, the cost of family breakdown in Britain is well over £20 billion, nearly one in two cohabiting parents split up before their child's fifth birthday, compared with one in 12 married parents, three-quarters of family breakdowns affecting young children now involve unmarried parents.

Dr Callan quoted psychologist Reibstein's claim that "every individual love story today pivots around the same conundrums: the tension between individual freedom and commitment, the task of regenerating mutual interest and desire in the teeth of predictability and routine, the need for security and stability against the push for novelty and the sheer difficulty of the economy of time and energy for each other within two complex lives".

In Dr Callan's inspirational talk on marriage, she emphasised the "need to re-envision or reconceptualise marriage for the 21st century. It's about tempering narcissism, love of self, with a sense of the greater project which is what can be achieved by two people who both live by the principle "look after number two" - because that willingness to sacrifice will pervade the rest of life and benefit society in countless ways. That is ultimately why well-functioning marriage is good for society."

I will be returning to this conference over and over again. Note that its subject was the need for healthy marriages to be encouraged, for what Dr Callan described as "its enduring appeal" to find the backing of the State, which has a vested interest in sound marriages and, it goes without saying, a commitment by the Church to this institution. Note, too, that there was no faith-based input in those figures quoted at the beginning of this piece.

Last Friday Dr Harry Vassallo wrote to say he attended the talk "a few days ago" (13 to be exact) "and preferred not to take the seat reserved for (him) in the front row". Well, as he admitted, he was late. "I preferred to watch and listen" and, later, "I preferred to listen than to reply." Pity. But the main thrust of his article was to bring up the matter of divorce, insisting, however, that his party is "shamelessly in favour of marriage, quality marriage, stress-free marriages if possible", which last phrase, we all know, is an oxymoron.

He also had a crack at Parliamentary Secretary Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, who "rose to make his presence felt and because he did not feel mine" (nor did many of those attending, incidentally. I never saw him, even at coffee-time) "he warned against those advocating divorce". I never heard Dr Mifsud Bonnici say that, but I have asked for a transcript to check it out.

One remark Dr Vassallo made in the context of property prices and those 53,000 vacant dwellings bears reproducing: "In a modern marriage you do not marry your husband or wife, you marry a mortgage, it occupies more of your thoughts, it takes more of your earnings, it is more likely to cause a breakdown of your marriage than the philandering you or your partner have no time or energy for". Odd. If you do not have the time or the energy (or the money, he could have added, since most of this is going into that mortgage) for philandering, then philandering is not a factor in family breakdowns. Mmmm. What I am prompted to ask is this: If you do not marry your husband or wife but a mortgage, how on earth will divorce help?  Remarriage will in all probability still confront you with a mortgage to which, using Dr Vassallo's lamentation, you will remain permanently married.

But the conference was primarily about sound marriages, about pitfalls and excessively high expectations that often can, as Dr Callan put it in another context, sow the seeds of a marriage's destruction. Cana, she pointed out, carried out essential work "in helping people to fulfil their aspirations while at the same time dealing with unhelpful myths about marriage: such as that living harmoniously will be easy if you are with the 'right' person; that conflict is a sign that something is gravely wrong and that you should always feel 'in love'."

I cannot resist one last quote from Dr Callan's inspirational speech. "A vibrant postmodern conjugality needs to articulate the radicality of marriage, its edgy otherness, its dangerous life-giving intimacies, its passionate fidelities, its risky transgressivity, its sexual warfare, its endless sexual incomprehensibilities, its tragic comedies, its primordial generativity, its destiny shaping power in our lives, its ghostly ancestors, the strange descendants its missions forth into the future."

Here is the point. Marriage is a radical institution that requires nurturing by those within it, helped by those outside it, and for which a man and a woman need to be prepared.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.