We’ve long known that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat likes to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. That’s why he is where he is today, because he sold the Labour Party’s soul to all and sundry, offering everything to everyone in return for power, knowing it is the taxpayer who will foot the bill at the end of the day, not he.
His latest mockery of public intelligence was his claim that, in his enthusiasm to get things done, he’s blundered along the way.
In his fable world tinselled with fake humility, Muscat says he feels like that hare who lost a race to a tortoise. The allegory doesn’t work, of course, but he doesn’t care because clichés are all that count when the audience is so fickle.
Snide, quirky and meaningless remarks are his trade mark, vagueness his talisman, luck his rabbit’s foot. Two years into his premiership, his rabbit fable is immensely offensive to an electorate that showed so much trust and hope in him. To those a bit older, his mention of rabbits brings back terrible memories from Labour’s Golden Years.
In December of 1981, there was naïve hope on this island that the Labour regime led by Dom Mintoff could be brought to an end through a democratic election.
It was not to be, of course. Labour assured through electoral district gerrymandering that the Nationalist Party would remain in opposition even though it polled the absolute majority of votes – 51 per cent.
On that fateful election day, having left all their hopes inside the ballot box, people had scurried home, huddled up in front of their television sets and anxiously awaited the election results from the only station available, state-owned Xandir Malta.
Their hopes were dashed when in the early hours of the morning on Republic Day, the television station they paid for through their taxes broadcast a song titled Run Rabbit Run, a blow below the belt for then PN leader Eddie Fenech Adami, the true winner of that election.
And as the Labour rabble took to the streets waving rabbit skins, Xandir Malta regaled its shocked viewers with the words Bonġu Malta Soċjalista as it broadcast footage of Labour mass meetings.
It was effectively a coup and an offence to the nation.
Premier Muscat is being as offensive today as Xandir Malta was then when he treats people like idiots by comparing himself to some rabbit whose enthusiasm to get things done has run away with him. The Café Premier scandal does not look like the rushed job he claims it to be, inversely.
What rushed job would have paid the Café Premier squatters their water and electricity bills, their VAT bills, their bank debts, their commercial bills, a €210,000 commission and, as a final insult, let them carry away €300,000 worth of furniture from the place?
Opposition leader Simon Busuttil has called on the government to stop any outstanding payments to the former café operators. Muscat, as always ready with a clever reply that invariably offends intelligence, said that since the mistakes done over the café deal were procedural not political, his government will go ahead and pay the former operators.
Surely, this clever Prime Minister knows that ‘procedural mistakes’ are exactly what make this abuse of public funds reversible.
But he does not regret what happened. For this Prime Minister, when you are racing a tortoise, when you are out to do ‘good’, you don’t keep books. You just look at the votes.
Because of its addiction to populism and the flattering power that comes with it, Labour thinks the end always justifies the means, whatever the moral cost
As if the Premier scandal weren’t bad enough, out comes the National Audit Office with reservations at the ‘direction’ given by Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi to Enemalta to come to a hedging agreement with Socar, a State-owned energy company in Azerbaijan.
Mizzi’s defence is that he had only ‘recommended’ to Enemalta to seek the ‘help’ of Socar in order to keep the price of fuel down. Former Enemalta chairman Charles Mangion, now a Labour MP, said Mizzi never ordered him to conclude a deal with Socar. Unfortunately, according to the audit office, Enemalta has a problem with record keeping and lacks a formal hedging policy.
In the 1970s, Mintoff too had sought the help of an undemocratic country, Libya, to meet Malta’s energy needs. The price Malta had to pay for that unholy alliance with Libya was terrible. With Gaddafi gone, Labour has now found another natural ally, Azerbaijan.
That hedging deal involving a minister was worth a stunning €67 million, but Muscat says the Nationalists are just nit-picking. He would know all about that, wouldn’t he, being a lover of Maltese clocks.
With Xandir Malta long having lost its monopoly on the island, Labour is finding it increasingly difficult to control the message. To the government’s embarrassment, Azeri news have revealed that our Prime Minister will be visiting that former Soviet country very soon.
Feeling caught out, Muscat now says he is not sure he will be going. The fact that a panicked Energy Ministry last weekend published the memorandum of understanding on energy Malta signed with Azerbaijan three months ago does not change anything. The message that comes across is that the government has something to hide over Azerbaijan.
It has been a terrible week for Labour, and Muscat’s political immaturity and inability to grasp the meaning of political responsibility is much to blame for the shambles his government is in.
He said on his campaign trail: “We are being criticised for our eagerness to get things done.”
That exactly is the problem with Labour. Because of its addiction to populism and the flattering power that comes with it, it thinks the end always justifies the means, whatever the moral cost.
The Prime Minister had no problem defending the fact that the planning authority has approved the reconstruction of Valletta’s Castille Square without asking for a full development permit. The capital city may be a Unesco World Heritage Site, but for Labour the Castille project “needs to be done and to be done quickly”. Mintoff thought very much the same way Muscat does today, and that is why we have ended up with social housing on top of City Gate.
Now, thanks to Muscat’s determination to get things done, we can look forward to a revamped Castille Square that looks no different from an average Fgura terraced house with gold aluminum fittings. That low this country’s standards have fallen.
Slowly but steadily, Labour and most especially its leader, are conceding how unprepared they were for the job.
True, Muscat is an excellent salesman and now that he is on the campaign trail again, we can expect him to excel. He probably will, come the next local elections, but the cracks are beginning to show.
Hype, like the spectacular closing down of a power station in Marsa the very day Labour was meant to be inaugurating a new powerhouse in Delimara, is slowly losing its appeal. It is also immensely arrogant to make such a mockery of your major electoral promise.
Two years into office, the electorate expects delivery from Labour, not excuses. People do not want a Premier Minister telling them that he considers cleaners, messengers and dog handlers as ‘positions of trust’. It is very offensive to the electorate to speak this way.
A ‘position of trust’ is a political appointment, a temporary post that disappears the moment the government changes. In describing practically every civil service post as a position of trust, Muscat is saying he will not work with you unless you are a loyal Labourite or, better still, a turncoat who publicly pledges loyalty to him, and him alone.
These are the makings of a popular dictatorship, a perversity of democracy and a shame upon an electorate that is prepared to put up with this offence to its intelligence.
In 1981, because of Labour insolence, we had to endure Run Rabbit Run on our television screens. People of good will, who want to see values reinstated in our public institutions, who believe in what is right and in the common good, can only look forward to the day when they would see this rabbit Premier run, and run fast, away into that oblivion called history.