Joseph Muscat’s Budget proposals must have cost Lou Bondi quite a few hours of hard slog. According to an e-mail which pinged into my inbox and was sent from the Bondiplus team early the next morning, they had received a number of media requests for the costings of the Labour leader’s proposals which were aired on the programme.

Faced with this avalanche of media requests, and for the greater good of the financially inept viewers Bondi had no option but to send out the costings himself.

I can imagine the scene when the costings were being made by his team: The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night playing in the background while they take a break from googling pithy quotations to flash on screen, and tot up the costs of Muscat’s million-euro proposals on their calculators.

The final estimate reached by these intrepid journalists was that Muscat’s proposals would cause the deficit to increase to a staggering €444 million. The Bondi script (because that’s how it was described) would have us believe that Muscat would be digging a bigger ħofra (hole) than the one we are currently flailing around in right now.

The logical corollary to this is that we are far better off under the Nationalist administration which is entirely blameless for any financial mismanagement or waste or mistaken decisions and which is absolved. Simple, no?

It would be, if Bondi’s Budget analysis was a comprehensive one which included those items of expenditure which Muscat criticised as being unnecessary. If these had to be seen to, then the picture would be considerably different.

Predictably enough, these items of expenditure were omitted from the analysis. Why bother providing all the information when a few cherry-picked examples suit the prepared ‘script’? There are other omissions, most notably any explanation as to how the final figures were reached.

I won’t go into the absurd logic behind the Bondi script. Labour’s representative on the programme, Charles Mangion, should have done that. After all, this ruse of projecting unsubstantiated figures has become rather repetitive and foreseeable.

Labour should raise its game, be prepared, and flatten Bondi with its own statistics and costings instead of flailing around helplessly while he picks figures out of thin air.

My main objection to the Bondi script is not that it provides the costings – however faulty, unsubstantiated, or inflated – of Labour’s proposals. After all, the opposition should be subject to scrutiny by the media, and its policies (if it has any, that is) should be placed under a spotlight. So I’ve got no beef with that.

What I find rather absurd is that the Bondiplus team acts as if the government does not exist. Or rather that the actions of the government are not held up to the same level of scrutiny as those of the opposition.

It may be because I may have nodded off at some point, or I may have blinked and missed it, but I have never seen any ‘analysis’ or costings of Nationalist proposals shown on a Bondiplus programme.

Come to think of it, I have never seen any Bondiplus programme in which the Prime Minister was faced with anything more taxing than a few gently lobbed questions as to why the public is not appreciative of his administration’s efforts to save the economy and the nation.

Has he ever been quizzed as to how he had projected a deficit of €98.8 million last year (when the international financial crisis was already well underway) and ended up with a deficit of €297 million? Are extraneous factors always to blame?

And if Bondi was in the mood for some calculator work, how come he’s never bothered to add up the cost of the projects which Gonzi promised in last year’s Budget and which haven’t seen the light of day? These include park and ride schemes in various localities, new roads, the perennially put-off storm water project, at least two sports complexes, childcare centres, a micro-enterprise park and a breakwater in Marsaxlokk.

If we’re going to expect our politicians to come up with costings as to how to finance their proposals, I would expect ‘investigative’ journalists like Bondi to ask the Prime Minister how he’s going to finance the building of the new parliament, the acquisition of St Philips’s Hospital and the pointless bridge to nowhere in the Valletta harbour.

And while he’s at it, he could also ask the Prime Minister why, in these cash-stretched times, the managers of ARMS Ltd were given a performance bonus for a newly set-up company which has done nothing but under-perform, why the Minister of Finance could splurge €173,000 on refurbishing the premises of his private secretariat and why taxpayers are going to have to shell out €2.5 million for that bridge.

I should think that it is in the public interest to have the costings of these items. It is probably even more relevant to have access to such information than unsubstantiated costings of what may or may not be on Muscat’s wish list. That’s because of the very obvious fact that it is the Nationalist Party which is in government and it is the decisions made by Gonzi which will affect us for the next three years at least.

It would seem logical that journalists should give as much importance to the economical implications of the decisions of the current administration as to potential mistakes of the PL if it ever makes it to government.

Unfortunately certain media outfits have confused their journalistic role of informing the public with their other role of bolstering the government. That’s what happens when media goes mediocre.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt