For a moment the government appeared to be doing something right last week, or nearly. The head of the civil service, a political appointee, came out to tell us that the square right outside the Prime Minister’s office window in Castille is to be revamped.
Labour’s answer to the Nationalists’ Renzo Piano project will be a bare square that looks like it was designed for a school project. Still, it looked like it had its good elements, at first.
The roundabout is to go and with it, one presumed, the statue of a criminal from over a century ago, Manwel Dimech. Alas with Labour, pleasure is always shortlived.
It turns out upon closer inspection that only the trees will go and Dimech will stay on to taunt us, as a constant reminder of how his admirer, former premier Dom Mintoff, had elevated him from a thief, murderer and counterfeiter into a Labour hero.
It is not clear where the Mintoff monument will go but from the artist’s impression it will very likely replace that fountain that resembles a pissoir, right in front of Castille’s main door. Clearly, under Joseph Muscat’s premiership, this country will continue to wallow in that mediocrity that is always associated with Labour.
As one architect put it, the Castille project looks like a “tasteless front garden”. People should remember that they voted for this before complaining. In any case, works have already started.
Once, Labour was said to be lower class. But with unprincipled opportunists enthusiastically filling its ranks nowadays, it has now been upgraded to third class mediocrity in a bowtie.
With Labour the bar is always so low because people do not expect better. That is understandable but why do people put up with it and with such submissive resignation?
Public indifference to the Café Premier scandal shows how low voters will stoop to ignore the terrible calamity that Labour will become. The Prime Minister claims he is learning on the job and that €4.2 million paid from taxpayer money to a private company is a “procedural lesson”, a one-off event to learn from and move on.
The more he speaks about that scandal, the worse it sounds.
Muscat claims he already shouldered political responsibility for those wasted millions when his government gave “full disclosure” on the matter to the National Audit Office. He obviously does not know what political responsibility means but, then, nor do his supporters, which tells why this country has much to worry about.
Giving full disclosure to the Auditor was not an option the government had. Being answerable to the Auditor General for public money spent is essential to our democracy.
It is not a concession from a benevolent Labour government. Political responsibility only sets in once the Auditor has completed his investigations, which he has.
The result was a most damning report but Muscat just shrugs it off.
He says he was not involved in the negotiations, although it was he who initiated them soon after becoming Prime Minister and then gave his go-ahead when they were concluded. That makes him directly responsible, politically, but Muscat is too busy campaigning to bother himself with that. Salesmanship is one thing he doesn’t need to learn on the job.
When, last week, the former land commissioner came out saying that one of the reasons he resigned was the Café Premier deal, the government’s response was partisan and as hysterical as a peroxide housewife in a street quarrel outside a grocery store.
The next round of local council elections is neither a test for the Nationalist Party nor the Labour Party. It is a test for the electorate
The Prime Minister said he never met the former commissioner but then went on to accuse him of not having flagged him any irregularity. Family and Social Solidarity Minister Michael Farrugia said that, during his time as parliamentary secretary, no one in the Government Property Division objected to deals related to Café Premiere or Australia Hall. And, to top that, a government spokesman said: “As a regulator, it would have been his (the commissioner’s) duty to flag specific reservations had he had.”
That’s the logic of a schoolboy: “Nobody told me I was doing wrong, so I’m innocent.”
We’ve been here before a hundred times with Labour. Just because you can get away with something does not make it right.
But there’s no explaining that to a political party that has no values and has sold its soul at pre-electoral backroom deals.
The Prime Minister tried to sound regretful for what happened. But when Times of Malta approached him and said, hey, there is still a chance not to pay that disgusting commission on the Café Premier deal, he said: “The contract is closed.”
That did not sound like a repentant man. It sounded more like someone who feels like he’s gotten away with something and who would do it all over again, given the chance.
In a normal democratic country, a prime minister faced with such damning accusations would have been history by now, living in his humble abode in Burmarrad, with a very humbled wife who is suddenly not a fashion trendsetter any more.
Instead we have a prime minister who trudges on, like nothing has happened, telling his gullible supporters that he is the underdog at the next election.
It is likely that Muscat’s salesmanship will pull him through again to deliver another stunning electoral result and add another certificate of shame to an electorate that prefers to be fooled than to face the reality of the monster it has elected. The next round of local council elections is neither a test for the Nationalist Party nor for the Labour Party. It is a test for the electorate.
Is this self-proclaimed liberal European country politically mature enough to say no to the amorality that Labour is applying in government or is it prepared to go along with it in the hope of some personal gain?
Is this self-proclaimed liberal European country prepared to continue to put up with that degenerate practice of Labour’s all-time buddies, the hunters?
Will the electorate vote for the common good, for common sense and, above all, for rule of law?
The hunters are applying the same hypocritical campaign as that used by their Labour friends when they pulled off the Tagħna Lkoll swindle. Whatever the surveys may say, it still looks like a victory for hunters because Labour and the hunters think the same way and will see each other through.
It is difficult to separate hunting from Labour because the two are based on the same myopic, selfish and amoral thinking that is the cause of much harm to this country.
There seems little hope. The anti-spring hunting campaign is all over the place, out of focus and clearly lacking strategy.
The Nationalists are still licking their wounds from the 2013 debacle and we cannot expect much from them.
The future of this country hangs on its silent moral majority who can choose to say no to Labour and hunting excesses, or to abdicate their responsibility.
The outcome of the hunting referendum and the local council elections, unimportant as they may be, will serve to show if this country has the political maturity to save the day by saying no to abuse or is still in the state it once was when the likes of Dimech were turned into national heroes just because Labour said so.
Dimech was a socialist and a criminal. Given the degenerate state this country is slipping into, voting for Labour and their hunting partners at this point in time would be criminal.
A Labour/hunting victory is a very scary prospect.