Louis Galea for Speaker

Former Education Minister Louis Galea will be nominated Speaker when Parliament convenes on Saturday for the first time since the general election, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi announced yesterday.

Dr Galea will retain his post throughout the entire legislature unless the new Leader of the Opposition agrees to nominate a Speaker from the opposition benches and accepts a pairing arrangement.

Dr Gonzi said the matter had been discussed at a meeting of the government's parliamentary group earlier yesterday. He confirmed that Dr Galea, who lost his seat in the House in the last election, was the only candidate discussed as likely to fill the post.

The government, which enjoys a mere one-seat majority in the House, recently proposed that an opposition MP should be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, linking this with an agreement on pairing.

A Speaker who is an MP loses his or her original vote but has a casting vote. And under pairing arrangements, opposition MPs are "paired" to government MPs and will not vote in the House if the government MPs are away on official business.

In a package of proposals, the government also suggested that the Deputy Speaker and the chairmen of House committees should be chosen from among government MPs. But the Opposition rejected the offer of nominating the Speaker and proposed instead that the government re-appoint former Speaker Anton Tabone until the new Labour Party leader is elected early next month. Mr Tabone did not contest the last election.

The opposition also proposed that Labour MP Carmelo Abela retains his post as Deputy Speaker, also just until Labour have a new leader. The deputy speaker, despite being an MP, does not lose his original vote.

The Labour party also declared that it would be considering pairing on a case-by-case basis.

The Prime Minister said yesterday that choosing a Speaker who would have to resign after just two months did not dignify the post, which is the fifth most important in the hierarchy of the country. This was especially so for someone like Mr Tabone who has occupied the post for two legislatures.

For this reason, the PN parliamentary group had decided to propose Dr Galea as the next Speaker but left the option open for further discussion after the new Leader of the Opposition is chosen.

Dr Gonzi said that if the new Labour leader wanted to choose the Speaker from the opposition benches, Dr Galea would be prepared to resign and make way for this nominee.

If, however, no agreement is reached, especially on pairing, then Dr Galea would retain his post for the entire legislature.

Furthermore, the government was also making a "concession" for the coming few weeks by agreeing to retain Mr Abela as Deputy Speaker. It would, however, expect him to step down if no agreement was eventually reached on pairing. The appointment of an Opposition MP as Deputy Speaker has always been linked to a pairing agreement. "Technically, we could have rejected Mr Abela since there is no agreement on pairing but the government is making this concession as a sign of goodwill and political maturity," he said.

Asked how Dr Galea had reacted to the proposal, the Prime Minister said he was thrilled and willing to serve his country.

With regard to the claim that the government only offered the choice of Speaker to the opposition so it could add another seat to its one-seat majority, Dr Gonzi said that with a pairing agreement, a one- or 10-seat majority would become irrelevant because every government MP away on official business would be paired to an opposition MP.

Dr Galea, a 60-year-old lawyer, has served as an MP since he was first elected in 1976 and as a minister in all Nationalist governments since 1987. His failure to be re-elected was one of the biggest surprises in the last general election.