The first time I saw Labour deputy leader Charles Mangion squirm was on Bondiplus when Lou Bondi was grilling him about the costings for Labour's "no tax on overtime" proposal. Mangion hemmed and hawed and did not produce them. So the presenter probed and questioned and handily came up with another set of figures (costings estimated by the Government).

Labour protested, but really it only had itself to blame. If you come up with a proposal you have to be able to substantiate it and show what it's going to cost you - otherwise it might be another pie-in-the-sky pre-electoral promise.

Mangion came in for more cross-examination about Labour's promise to halve the surcharge. Finally he explained that the surcharge would be halved for the duration of the legislature if Labour were elected and the position was somewhat clearer.

That was fine - by dint of dogged questioning the electorate had got to know more about a major party's main proposal regarding the economy. The media had come up trumps in its investigative role and in helping to keep the public informed.

So when Lawrence Gonzi announced that a new Nationalist government would reduce the tax bands, I welcomed the news not mulling too much over the fact that it was a post-Budget and pre-electoral announcement. After all - why look a gift horse in the mouth?

But after the initial euphoria wore off and somebody started talking about "feasibility" and "sustainability", I decided to try to see where the Government would be getting this extra money from. As this is the same administration which prides itself on providing up-to-the-minute information, I half-expected there to be a website where I could read all about it. Or if not that, at least a miserly press release. But no, nothing doing.

Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech refused to show his workings "to avoid them being copied by our Opposition and included as their own proposals". I hope Fenech realises how ridiculous he seemed, like a nerdy schoolboy hunching over his copybook in order not to let his classmate copy his maths homework. The Prime Minister then said that the proposals should cost the country some €46.58 million (Lm20 million) and that the increase in wealth and economic activity would make good for them. But still no sign of the workings carried out to arrive at those figures - leaving us no way of ensuring that these are realistic projections.

Anybody driving past the Msida roundabout will realise that the PN and MLP have a problem. They must be getting their billboards from the same person and what's more he's giving them a nearly identical product which does not say much for the distinct image that both want to portray.

I'm not talking about those ultra bright "positive" billboards of inanely grinning families featuring a man with a hideously-checked shirt which clashes with whatever the rest are wearing. No, it's the other batch of billboards which I'm referring to - the ones which mark the start of the "negative" campaign.

The PN set the ball rolling with a collage of photos of Labour candidates with a faded red backdrop. 'Same old faces, nothing new' we were told, while being shown the faces of Labour candidates some of whom had been ministers in Mintoff's days.

The billboard didn't have to Photoshop the snaps too much to come up with the requisite number of bald pates and wrinklies - some members of the shadow Cabinet have been in Parliament for ages and others look as if they have.

The message this billboard was trying to push through is quite clear. It's echoed in the PN newspaper ad campaign and in practically every article and column penned by people involved in the Nationalist propaganda campaign. In a nutshell, it would have the electorate believe that the MLP candidates featured are antediluvian politicians with antiquated policies and ideas with absolutely nothing new to contribute to the national debate. The billboard is also reminiscent of Old Labour electoral leaflets and the person who came up with the whole concept would have been banking on those images triggering that automatic quiver of fear in those voters who remember the dark 1980s days. This is where the concept begins to unravel.

Over 17,200 new voters are eligible to vote in the coming election. They have grown up under a Nationalist government and the stories of violence which their parents might have suffered do not have the same impact as those with first-hand experience of it. It seems distant and unreal to them. When people like the former PN mayor of Mosta, Giovanni de Martino, describe a Labour victory as a cataclysmic doomsday scenario, the young voters of today just laugh. As the whizzkid who repaired my computer remarked: "It's not going to happen. My mother and father keep getting hysterical about it, but then they're old."

There's another thing which sticks out very noticeably with the "Labour is old and tired" strategy. It's that "PN is equally old and tired" and has an equivalent number of outdated dinosaurs on the government benches. This, I suppose, is why the Nationalist ministers have been made to disappear by the PN media team and why they are pushed to the back at every party event.

While channel zapping this week I caught sight of one of those big tent discussion events which the PN loves. The Net TV cameras lingered on the faces of the new candidates and skimmed over the ministers standing far from the Prime Minster's circle. It's as if Gonzi is ashamed of his ministers and is fleeing their company.

Of course, the Labour media have picked up on his sense of reticence and delights in linking him with his ministers. So we get the Labour posters loaded with smirking, unpopular ministers jostling behind a bumbling Gonzi struggling with an ATM. The tagline 'A Safe Pair of Hands' makes fun of the efficient persona the Prime Minister tries to project. The billboard gets some marks for humour - not many though (the ATM joke is rather weak) but loses them for its lack of originality - this is essentially a repeat of Labour's post-Budget "Too Little, Too Late" poster.

Except for underlining the fact that the Prime Minister is fleeing from his unpopular ministers, it says nothing new. In both cases, it's the same old faces and the same old spin. At least the billboard man is laughing all the way to the bank. The rest of us are wondering why the high-tech PN and the supposedly rejuvenated MLP can't come up with anything better.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt