90 per cent and counting

While the rest of the country relaxes in the cleanest and clearest seas it has ever experienced, the Leader of the Opposition and his coterie of mostly failed former ministers – who in the 1970s, 1980s and for a near terminal 22 months in the mid-1990s all but brought the country to its knees – expect the government to mark time and abdicate its quest for solutions to the country’s day-to-day challenges.

According to Labour, everything falls within the broad bracket of electioneering, currying favour and ensuring the party’s support is strengthened before the country goes to the polls.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist government continues to run the island, proposes legislation to regulate IVF and the rights and duties of cohabitating couples, reaches agreement with the police on improved compensation packages, introduces reforms that should lead to a more efficient and accountable judiciary and has set the day when the remaining provisions of the Freedom of Information Act will come into force.

Aren’t these the pastures where the leading lights of Malta’s self-styled modern, progressive movement should have grazed and left their mark?

Surely it is ironic that these and other measures are, or will shortly be placed on the statute book by a government long considered by its short-sighted detractors as on the wrong side of history, past its sell-by date and only fit to be mothballed!

Irrespective of its sponsors and their methods, divorce legislation, about which the Leader of the Opposition promised to table a Private Members’ Bill in the next legislature presumably commencing sometime in 2013, is already on the statute book.

Those who have time on their hands and the patience to go through the PN’s 2008 electoral pledges will be delighted to find that, despite having to contend with one of the most divisive and vindictive oppositions on record, not to mention disloyalty and internal strife within the party, the Nationalist government has ticked off and delivered on the vast majority of measures promised in the party’s electoral programme.

Clearly the PN manifesto does not refer to aspects such as the global recession and its attendant risks which were not on the horizon at the time.

Nor does it hint at the turbulence, uncertainty, dangers and flack that followed the Arab Spring. Much less to the problems currently assailing the euro and the austerity measures most EU countries have been forced to apply.

Moreover, this government has had to contend with the spiralling cost of fuel and the massive unemployment and economic woes afflicting countries all around us.

In addition, a war on our doorstep and thousands of irregular immigrants and yet, despite these unforeseen problems, Lawrence Gonzi and his government have raised the bar consistently, surpassed all previous results in generating employment, tourism, investment and financial services, and steered the country into calmer, much safer waters.

Although some political commentators tend to brush off anything the Nationalist Party has achieved to date, Dr Gonzi and his government have delivered on more than 90 per cent of the PN’s electoral pledges and the count is still on.

Therefore, the question that comes to mind is why this arguably most successful of governments is still trailing in the opinion polls when it has done so much in the last five years to improve the people’s standard of living, restore and enhance the country’s natural environment and historical heritage, increase the supply and quality of jobs offered by the private sector as well as the range of education and health facilities provided by the state?

The answer to this conundrum should not only come from the Nationalist Party but also, with due deference to age-old ideological party allegiances and sympathies, from every one entitled to vote at the next election.