In his Blogtime column of October 24, under the title Irresponsible Leadership, Minister George Pullicino demonstrates how irresponsible governance of the country has become under the present Administration. Echoing his Prime Minister, Mr Pullicino claimed that Opposition Leader “Dr Muscat let Alfred Sant pose a series of technical questions (over the motion regarding the European bailout fund) prolonging the process and shedding a shadow of uncertainty over the outcome… The motion was… postponed to the following Monday when Dr Sant chose to split hairs…”.

The facts are as follows: A resolution for Malta to increase its participation in the eurozone Greek loan and a Bill to do likewise for the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) were copied to the opposition on October 3 along with a short Finance Ministry briefing note that turned out to be misleading. Right from the start, the opposition said it would vote for the two proposals and did so.

But parliamentary work is there to be done not skived. Following research between Monday and Wednesday, it turned out that the Bill passed last year covering Malta’s participation in the EFSF was null because contrary to what the law says, the EFSF agreement had not been attached to it.

Moreover, at committee stage on October 5, the Finance Minister acknowledged that both the Greek loan agreement and the EFSF agreement had since last year been further amended by intergovernmental agreement. Yet neither of these two new documents had been appended or referred to in the new legislation. Before we arrived at this point, hours were expended, basically because the House stood adjourned so the president of the Committee could give a ruling on the mess we faced.

At the end of the Wednesday Committee meeting, I mentioned to the House other pending points of clarification that I wished to raise.

Nobody from the government side bothered to follow up with me or whoever regarding these matters, which I duly raised when the Committee reconvened on October 10.

Obviously the Leader of the Opposition, Dr Muscat, was abreast of these matters and was fully of the view that approval of the bailout funds needed to be carried out in due form.

I am paid by the people to do my job as a parliamentarian and unlike the present grossly overpaid ministers, will continue to do so with all due diligence. As a result of my “hair-splitting”, the government which had started out with half-baked legislative proposals on the bailout fund that were less than eight pages long, published a final Act that took over 275 pages of the Government Gazette.

Actually, the procedures being followed to adopt eurozone intergovernmental agreements are still not in conformity with Malta’s laws and the Constitution, as I shall claim during today’s adjournment in Parliament.