Some time ago there were moves afoot to allow 16-year-olds to be able to vote. I bet that the Nationalist and Labour parties now wish that the right to vote had been extended to tweenies, under-10s and toddlers, seeing as they’re the ones who are going to benefit from the tablet bonanza being offered by both major parties. By now the Labour and Nationalist give-aways are the stuff of a thousand online jokes.

The Nationalist and Labour parties seem to have abandoned any notion of realistic or sustainable budgeting for their rash pre-electoral promises- Claire Bonello

Joseph Muscat had barely finished uttering his electoral promise of a tablet computer for all Year 4 students, and the usual suspects burst into cackles of derision, before Lawrence Gonzi decided to trump the Leader of the Opposition by offering tablets to all students and teachers. For some minutes you could hear the sound of furious backpedalling as those who had rubbished the Labour effort now found words of praise for the tablet giveaway.

Some time later, Nationalist exponents even managed to distinguish the two quasi-identical offers. According to them, the Gonzi give-away was part of a carefully thought-out educational campaign where children would be able to source the fountain of all online knowledge. On the other hand, Muscat’s tablets would simply allow children to play Angry Birds and access online porn.

Well, I suppose you can spin anything if you put your mind to it, but whether people will believe it is another matter altogether.

The whole Tablet Trumps affair gives rise to three observations.

The first relates to the fact that both the Nationalist and Labour parties seem to have abandoned any notion of realistic or sustainable budgeting for their rash pre-electoral promises.

While the Labour proposal is more reasonable, being restricted to tablets for children in one school year, the Nationalist Party appears to have abandoned all sense of budgetary prudence, with the Prime Minister seemingly intent on pushing a tablet into the hands of every toddler, child or teenager still in schooling.

Now I know that the PL and the PN are droning on about the need to bridge the digital divide and enter the brave new world of cutting-edge technology, but how exactly is the tablet proposal to be financed? Or to quote the Prime Minister, “Il-flus minn fejn ġejjin?” (Where is the money coming from?).

Labour have mentioned the involvement of the private sector and a cost of €1.5 million for the State, but how exactly would a future Nationalist government fund tablets for all under-16s? It seems a reasonable question to ask when considering such a blatantly obvious vote-catching, me-too ploy.

• Here are some tips for the media people involved in putting up party productions:

Don’t crib any more Obama clips – we’ve all seen the infinitely better originals.

Another no-no is featuring old men in cloth caps lecturing young people about their great Maltese forefathers. The Labour Party is currently showing one such clip. Every time it comes on I want to bang my head against the wall or cover my eyes at the incredible inanity of it all.

The offending clip features a group of young people talking animatedly about politics. One gel-haired youth concludes that, “It’s always better to go for the devil you know”. His declaration is accompanied by that exaggerated over-gesticulating that is the bane of all local sitcoms.

This prompts Narcy Calamatta and friend (wearing cloth caps to show us they are wise old men who have lived through a lot) to go on a nostalgia trip.

We get shown flashbacks of Calamatta as a little boy accompanying a delegation of Maltese people marching up to the Palace in 1942 to tell the British colonial masters that, “Malta will never surrender”. Calamatta is suitably inspired to give a rousing speech to the teenagers who start nodding their heads in agreement.

At this point I was peering at the screen through my fingers as I cringed at the naffness of it all. Apart from the annoying niggles in this clip (Why is a little boy hanging around with an official delegation? Was it really the Maltese who stopped the Allies from capitulating to the forces of evil in World War II?), the most obvious question which springs to mind is what relevance this flashback can have to the current political scene?

Are the arrogant Brits in the clip meant to remind us of GonziPN? Are we meant to shake off the yoke of the Nationalist Party in the same way we stood up to our colonial masters? What on earth is the whole thing about?

And how are we meant to figure it out if we’re burying our face in our hands at the incongruity of it all?

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt