Pushing politics even deeper into the mire

Just when you think Maltese politics cannot sink deeper or has sunk enough, some new example to defy your conclusion is trotted out. One such is the case of the pay Joseph Muscat receives for carrying out his duties as Leader of the Opposition.

The amazing thing is that it was the Prime Minister himself, a parliamentary expert if ever there was one, and a Christian Democrat, who in mid-week helped to give serious politics a fresh ducking.

One cannot help but think that Lawrence Gonzi did so in a new attempt to brush away the soot with which he covered himself by increasing the ministerial pay packet in the oddest and least democratic of manners.

There can be no doubt that by today’s standards the pay received by the Prime Minister and his executive team is laughable. Pitched at a margin above the salary paid to our highest civil servants, it is substantially below what hundreds of executives are paid in various segments of our economy, including in the broader public sector.

Nor can there be any argument that the honorarium given to Members of Parliament, also pegged to civil service pay, is too low, even allowing for the fact that they can retain a paid private occupation.

The underlying explanation, of course, is that civil service pay has gone out of kilter with the rest of the economy and that relativities – ratios of pay to each other – have become far too compressed.

At a time when the public sector should already have started being paid according to new collective agreements, since the old ones expired in December 2010, and that the structural budget deficit continues to rise in absolute terms, it is unlikely that the government would wish to expand public pay by adjusting the top rates and working down.

Which means that all those who work in the civil service, or whose pay is linked to it, are in a bind. That did not prevent the Cabinet, on Gonzi’s initiative, from swelling its pay packet the moment the new government was elected in 2008.

Gonzi’s cabinet was not the first to act that way; nor, unless the elected political class fashions a new automatic pay mechanism, will it be the last. That is done in the context of a predictable knee-jerk condemnation by the opposition of the day, as the Nationalists well remember when in that role themselves.

What was particularly wrong in the case of the current Cabinet is the way it went about it. For one thing, the timing was less than happy. The economy was in throes of a recession. The cost of living was rising. Everyone was feeling the pinch, none more so than the lower paid.

Yet the Prime Minister, while deciding not to slash income tax according to his solemn electoral promise, went ahead with the early Cabinet pay rise. Worse still, he did not make a clean breast of it. The news was only made public 30 months later, last December, in a throwaway reply by the Finance Minister to a parliamentary question.

The country, including some government MPs and not just the opposition, was up in arms. The then Speaker along with the opposition leader, to whom the increase should also have applied, declared they knew nothing about it.

Cabinet said it would backdate their rise and in the same breath revealed that MPs’ honoraria had also been revised upwards in 2008, but not paid. That notwithstanding, the Prime Minister’s executive team had started to receive the increased MPs’ honorarium in addition to their wages from that year.

Joseph Muscat said he would not accept the increase, but would donate it to charity. The country at large declared the Prime Minister had acted crassly and selfishly. Gonzi’s solution was remarkable. He removed the increase extended to MPs.

That increase was also removed from the Cabinet’s enhanced salary. But he left the old MPs’ honorarium addition to ministers’ salary in place and referred the MPs’ pay issue to the House Business Committee.

In a meeting of the committee, opposition representatives said that all parliamentary pay, including the Cabinet’s, should stay at the pre-election level and that agreed new rates would apply as from after the next election.

The government would have none of that, thereby bringing the committee to a screeching halt. Now it transpires that the opposition leader has not been paid an enhanced salary, so that he could give the net increase to charity.

Government sources told The Times that the matter was closed because the opposition had stopped the House Business Committee from working. To top it all, Gonzi followed up on Wednesday to rebuke The Times for reporting that Muscat had not received the additional honorarium, saying the honorarium was already within his pay. That was a clear effort to confound further a confounded issue.

Gonzi is truly becoming barely recognisable from the man one knew up to the time he was elected leader of the Nationalist Party. He plays about with politics with an alarming nonchalance and at times keeps an uncomfortable distance from the truth.

The issue of the opposition leader’s pay is not only a distraction from serious politics, and the problems which the country faces, both domestically and externally. It is an exercise in manipulation.

One should not begrudge the ministerial team from getting a less miserable salary than hitherto. But the Prime Minister has to map out a better way to ensure that they really deserve it.

Such playing about with the truth arouses feelings worse than the derision which political manoeuvring often creates.