Three of our Lord’s disciples made gross errors of judgement. Peter denied he knew Jesus but became the rock on which Jesus built His Church.

There’s a difference between changing one’s policy position and breaking a promise

Thomas refused to accept the Resurrection until he poked his fingers into Jesus’ wounds but was the only witness to the Assumption of Mary.

Paul used to persecute the followers of Jesus with a passion before his conversion.

They were all given another chance and they rose to the challenge.

According to Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and his deputy, Joseph Muscat cannot be trusted with the future of the country because the Opposition Leader had opposed Malta’s membership of the EU.

Neither Muscat nor any of our politicians are saints but if the apostles could change their mind, why can’t Muscat? He is a politician and politicians often change their mind. Indeed, they ought to change their minds even on their strongly-held beliefs when the political environment changes, as long as they are honest about it.

Recently, the PN’s deputy leader admitted that his party changed its mind about the taxation of minimum wage earners because it wasn’t worth the flak. His boss had said a few weeks earlier that there was nothing wrong with minimum wage earners paying a little bit of tax. Both changed their minds and well they did.

The Prime Minister and his deputy vociferously defended the proposed ACTA treaty but changed their mind when thousands of Maltese voiced their opposition to it and well they did.

The Prime Minister and his government spent years saying that subsidisation of energy bills was “irresponsible” but changed their minds when they could not convince anybody about their case and well they did.

The PN dragged its feet for years on the question of gays’ civil rights and divorce but it changed its mind when it became amply clear that it was out of synch with civil society and well it did.

The PN dragged its feet on having a proper Whistleblowers’ Act but it now says it will implement it if elected and well it did.

There’s nothing wrong when a political leader or a political party do a ‘flip-flop’ or a ‘U-turn. The important thing is that, when they do it, they do not take the electorate for cretins and claim that their contrasting positions on an issue are consistent with each other. It’s simply hypocritical to advocate contradictory positions yet deny the self-contradiction.

Politicians need to be allowed leeway in changing their minds as the result of changing conditions. What’s wrong with a politician changing his position? It only becomes wrong if he denies having done it.

If a politician realises that proposals he is making do not have public support, it is perfectly legitimate for him to put such proposals on the back-burner or even to abandon them should the public continue to oppose them.

Accusing the politician concerned of ‘flip-flopping’ would be dishonest because there’s a difference between changing one’s policy position and breaking a promise. Breaking a promise is a problem of a higher order than changing a policy position.

Speaking as an economist, I have no problem admitting that my profession has changed its mind on many tenets of economics. For example, we used to focus entirely on capital accumulation but now also look at intangible factors. Why?

Because Robert Solow found that there is a “residual” in an equation that used capital to explain economic results.

Does it mean that economists have done a ‘flip-flop’ or is it that, being serious academics, they have not perceived their change of mind as constituting a threat to their credentials?

The US political world, for example, is replete with people who changed their minds.

Hillary Clinton was a president of the Wellesley Young Republicans and worked for the Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater presidential campaigns before she joined the Democrats.

Ronald Reagan started out as a liberal democrat and an avid devotee of Franklin Delano Roosevelt before he decided to become a Republican.

Condoleezza Rice was a Democrat until 1982 before she switched allegiances to the Republicans.

Did they perform gross errors of judgement or were they simply honest enough to admit to their changed views? Did it make them any less credible or unfit for public service?

Gonzi and Muscat are not the first politicians to change their mind on something. Way back in 1885, Fortunato Mizzi and other Italophiles were adamant on stopping changes in education being introduced by the colonial government just because they loved Italy and anything Italian. They went to the length of moving a motion in the Council of Government to exclude all money voted for the Education Department from estimates of sums necessary to install light and heating in night schools, which had been opened after a petition by 900 workmen who wanted to further their studies (George Cassar, Journal of Maltese Education Research, 2003).

Fortunately, Gonzi’s predecessors did not persist in their antieducation antics.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says that people who are right a lot often change their minds. He even believes that it is healthier to have an idea that contradicts one you had before rather than making consistency the be-all and end-all of action.

It seems he and other successful people go along with John Maynard Keynes when he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

I haven’t yet come across anybody who said that Keynes should have been consigned to the scrapheap of history.

So should we consider that Muscat is not to be trusted with running the country? Well, he changed his mind. As also did Gonzi and his party on many other things.

Many politicians who changed their minds went on to perform public duty of excellence. Let’s grow up and let the positives work for the common good.

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