Other than prestidigitation

We haven’t had the privilege of seeing the Leader of the Opposition reacting to the Budget in the House or on Bondì+ yet, so I can’t offer you an incisive analysis of the relative merits of the two party leaders. I might do so next Saturday but there’s no guarantee I won’t eschew the ineffable pleasure of gazing on the smiling fair visage of Joseph Muscat if something better presents itself as a diversion.

...people don’t get told what’s going on...- I.M. Beck

Call me biased, and I’m sure the Lil’Elves will, but I thought that the Prime Minister was rather good on Tuesday. For the benefit of those whose grasp of nuance and understatement is Elfin (read the comments and you’ll see where I’m coming from) that is code for 'he was excellent'.

He started out looking a touch tired but soon recovered and started laying into 'Muscat' as he kept calling him, for all the world as if his (supposedly) principal interlocutor in the House was a scatty schoolboy who had been caught sneaking a quick fag behind the bike sheds. A bit of hoisting with his own petard that, after the way Dr Muscat had referred to the Prime Minister on a couple of occasions in the recent past.

In fact, so scathing was the Prime Minister of the Leader of the Opposition’s take on the Budget that I suspect that there is something to the idea that Dr Muscat wasn’t actually paying much attention during the Minister of Finance’s speech. Lawrence Gonzi showed him to be wrong on so many points that if this had been a bachelor’s degree final, a third would have been the best Dr Muscat could have got.

Oh well, Dr Muscat will have to be pretty extraordinary on Bondì+ next Tuesday, so I suppose I’ll have to make an effort to watch him, even though I can record the show or watch it on di-ve. I hope the Lil’Elves don’t interpret this as some sort of dastardly plan to put unfair pressure on the poor lamb, given his propensity to sound smug when he’s trying to make a point.

The thing is, of course, that Dr Muscat is on the back foot and no mistake. Not only did the confidence vote(s) backfire on him politically, ensuring that the Nationalist Party closed ranks, the Budget just couldn’t really be answered in the circumstances. True, Labour’s mouthpieces, in between languid updating of their Facebook pages from the House and less relaxed updating of their diaries to make sure that they got the date of the Budget right, tried manfully to invoke Citizen John (Dalli) and his nifty new power station idea but the Prime Minister shot that down in flames on Tuesday.

Labour’s bragging that they know how to bring down utility tariffs is also becoming just so much hot air, especially when you take into account that either they’re spinning us a yarn or they don’t care one jot that people are spending so much (even if it’s less than they choose to spend on their mobiles). If Labour really cared, they’d share their wisdom but, as in 1996 with VAT, they prefer to give us choice little morsels in the form of sound bites that sound pretty but are actually as vapid as a Big Brother contestant.

They even tried to work in the public transport angle, which is starting to bore even the Lil’Elves now that things are settling down. I wish people would make up their mind, incidentally: first they whinge because the Prime Minister doesn’t listen and then, as soon as he takes a break from unimportant things like running the country, they whinge because he takes an interest. It’s like the peculiar angle Dr Muscat is taking about the income-tax cuts that he keeps banging on about: he knows it can’t be done but the Prime Minister is wrong not to do it anyway.

After the Budget, we were regaled with the usual comments about the ministers’ €500 pay-hike, though, with really bad timing for the Lil’Elves, the Auditor-General reported on Wednesday that he had found nothing wrong with the way this was brought into effect, though it could have been handled better.

I did a bit of research on the famous €500, by the way, and from what I was told it’s not even that, more like €370 or so and all it is, ironically, is the ministers being treated the same way as every other MP. All MPs who are not ministers, even the ones who work for the government or its authorities or agencies, such as the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, now get their honoraria as MPs over and above their other earnings, whether these arise from the public purse or from professional practice or private sector employment. Ministers, on the other hand, didn’t used to get their honoraria, which is manifestly unfair, given that they forego all other income while they are in office.

Could it have been handled better from a PR point of view? Obviously it could, that’s one of the government’s main problems, people don’t get told what’s going on (even though the Lil’Elves wouldn’t care, of course) but, looked at dispassionately, it is in no way as big a deal as Labour’s chorus boys and girls have been humming it to be.

And there you have it, folks, the Budget has come and gone and the Lil’Elves have shot their bolts, adding fuel to the little fire that’s smouldering under Labour’s posteriors, the fire whose smoke-signals read 'Labour has peaked and peaked way too early'.

It’s up to Dr Muscat, both in the House on Tuesday and on the box a bit later, to try to show us that there’s a bit more up there than sound bites, cynicism and prestidigitation.

No pressure, of course.

imbocca@gmail.com

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