Sixty-eight fellow citizens are being called to take a first and decisive step on the proposal of a 69th colleague of theirs.
Well, after all is said and done the famous discussion on the institutional road map on the divorce Bill before the House of Representatives reduces itself to this one fundamental scenario: the democratic conscience of citizen-MPs is to determine the future of marriage in Malta .
The leaders of both parties in Parliament have given them what is referred to as a free vote. This may sound like a decision empowering MPs; however, in reality, within the circumstances of the marriage-divorce debate it may end up to be a limitation in the possibilities open to each and every MP.
The reason is that the Nationalist Party has confirmed officially that the ultimate decision on the marriage-divorce debate will rest in the hands of the hundreds of thousands voter-citizens, but only should a majority of the citizen-MPs be in favour of the divorce Bill.
Sounds complicated, but that’s how it is.
The first decision facing the citizen-MPs would therefore be why has their colleague decided to bypass the electorate in proposing a Bill on divorce? Couldn’t he have formed a committee promoting a Yes-to-divorce referendum before presenting his Private Member’s Bill ?
In the topsy-turvy world which Malta is living in at the moment, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is giving himself and his other citizen-MPs two votes to your one vote on the issue on marriage-divorce. They will be voting as free citizens without any electoral mandate, once as citizen-MPs and another time together with you and me as citizen-voters. This is indeed a topsy-turvy democracy.
Yet this is exactly what the end-product of the so-called road map intends to be.
Malta has what is called a representative type of democracy in which the citizens elect a House of Representatives for a maximum period of five years. During this time the citizen-MPs are constitutionally free to vote as they wish; in fact, they are also free to move from one party to another in what is called crossing the floor. They may also in so-doing topple a government or strengthen a wafer-thin majority in the House of Representatives.
Then we have a few cases where representative democracy gives way to a ‘direct’ form of democracy in which all citizens having the right to vote are requested to directly decide single issues which are considered to cut across party politics. This, of course, is done through a referendum.
In the normality of things, whenever citizens decide on an issue through direct democracy their representatives are requested to pay at least due respect and act on the decision taken by all their fellow citizens.
This time, this is not what Pullicino Orlando has been insisting upon. He is requesting that his other citizen-MPs first take the decision themselves and then ask all the other citizen-voters to vote on only one of the many options which the entire marriage-divorce debate raises.
Why shouldn’t the other citizen-MPs tell their colleague that he should have first consulted the hundreds of thousand citizen-voters on the issue before deciding on his own to present his Private Member’s Bill on such a hot and controversial issue?
By so-doing, the other citizen-MPs would not be killing the marriage-divorce debate. On the contrary, they would be firstly living up to their oath to represent the will of the electorate instead of substituting their personal opinion to that of the electorate.
More fundamentally, they would depoliticise the very important debate taking place in Maltese society on the future of the family in Malta, in which the House of Representatives is to serve as the focal point of providing the rest of society with the vital information on the true state of marriage in Malta, warts and all.
There are still vital sectors of society that have held back from participating more actively in the debate because of the increasing politicisation of the debate.
If, therefore, the citizen-MPs were to conscientiously act freely, they are to acknowledge that at this stage of events they are no better than the rest of the country’s citizen-voters, and return the right to decide to where it should have belonged from the very beginning.
This Private Member’s Bill should be stopped in its tracks because it does not satisfy one fundamental requisite: the right of hundreds of thousands of voter-citizens to decide for themselves in an unconditioned and informed way on the entire issue of marriage-divorce.