We will not let lies rest

So, we were supposed to have had a political truce over the Christmas and new year period. Even that has turned out to be a lie. The Prime Minister continued with his public political campaigning and partisan political programmes continued to be aired on the PN media.

This must be the election campaign where, more than ever before, among the filmy platitudes come a multitude of whoppers and, historically, the PN have an amazing track record in this area. So it is really something to look out for now that GonziPN are even going beyond this PN norm.

I say this judging by the run-up to the campaign these last few months where the Prime Minister has been lying prolifically.

He gave us the ‘wrong’ information about the Brazilian company’s ‘investment’ while acting surprised that Labour did not know of such a venture. Of course, we couldn’t know about a GonziPN fabrication.

Then came the story, in the after-Budget press conference, about minimum wage earners on a single tax computation. They would not be paying income tax, the Prime Minister told us, keeping a straight face. And what do you know? These people shall actually be paying income tax.

The Prime Minister went on to tell another gross untruth on national television when he said that if the general election and local elections were to be held concurrently then the general election could not be held before March 9 even if he wanted to. This, he wrongly said, was because the law did not allow local elections to be brought forward.

The truth is, though, that it is within the law to hold the local elections earlier or later and, therefore, the council elections factor was in no way impinging on the Prime Minister's decision on whether to call the general election at an earlier date.

We saw and heard the PN president lying about the fake notice of transfer notes when she said that they were not sent to government employees by the PN. When pressed, a short while later she had to admit the truth, that, yes, the PN was the culprit.

For those of you not au courant with this story, the content of the said note also was a blatant lie, informing employees that they will be transferred from their place of work in July 2013 if Labour is elected. This, while distorting the meaning of meritocracy and maliciously playing about with the words audit and redeployment.

A lie carried on even by the new deputy leader who ought to know much, much better. Instead of coming clean on the issue when the opportunity arose, he asked in that typical pseudo-concerned doe-eyed look of his: “what is this audit?” “What is this redeployment?” He’s so worried about it. Oh dear.

Is he not ashamed that as an MEP he does not know, or pretends not to know, of the European Union’s Flexicurity Pathways?

Does he not know that an exercise in iskills profiling that originated from the EU’s Flexicurity Pathways, which the Prime Minister called “one of the main pillars of the National Reform Programme”, started in January 2010?

Is he not aware that the Government concluded two audit reports on government employees?

The reports – Inventory in HR Skills In the Public Administration, one on the public service and the other on public sector entities – were published in April 2011 and June 2011 respectively.

This is from the introduction to these reports: “One of the main pillars of Malta’s National Reform Programme is the Flexicurity Pathway. This strategy acknowledges the need to conduct a skills audit of the national working population… From a management perspective, skills profiling assists in identifying skills gaps and to identify measures to bridge these gaps (through training, redeployment etc.)…

“The HR Systems and Data Management Directorate, PAHRO, was responsible for managing the implementation and the compilation of the Skills Profile Exercise in the Public Administration…”

These are the technical people who carry out these audits for those who have been ‘innocently’ asking.

But, clearly, the agenda is to lie about Labour. And, in spite of the fact that the new PN deputy leader is supposed to understand the technical terms redeployment and audit, it was under his watch that the anonymous fake notices of transfer were sent to government employees. And it was he who went on national television and expressed his worry about these words. Till this very day, on electronic comment boards everywhere, even on the online version of this newspaper, PN elves keep regurgitating these lies about Labour. We are in duty bound to continue exposing the PN for what they are.

In the last election, GonziPN won largely on the basis of promises made (which over these five years did not materialise), power of incumbency, together with a good sprinkling of lies, the biggest of which was the one on the Mistra contract. This time, GonziPN (or is it SimonPN now?) started earlier in trying to win with continuous abject lies and fantasies.

Just in case there are still those who might be misled all over again, Labour has to expose every falsity each time. If the PN repeat a lie 100 times, we have to rebut it with the same frequency.

It’s a shame that GonziPN has reduced political campaigning to this level of children’s play but it is our duty towards the electorate not to let lies rest.

Helena Dalli, MP, is the Labour Party’s spokeswoman on the public sector and gender equality.