This year seems to have established itself already as the year when the Labour government’s credibility, particularly that of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, will plummet, further exposing him for the ‘door-to-door salesman’ politician that he is. The first two days of the year offered us what can only be described as jokes by the government, and I use the word here in the most ironic of ways.
Day one was the Prime Minister’s New Year greeting. His office issued for broadcast a hollow propaganda video, riddled with dishonesty, and crudely dissembled as ‘New Year’s greeting by the Prime Minister’.
It fast became the epitome of all that is wrong with this government. To the sausage machine, that is the government’s communications office, facts and figures are totally irrelevant so long as they are kept out of the picture by some slick acting and production techniques.
In the case of this video, the Office of the Prime Minister’s dishonesty has been well and truly exposed, and the facts are now publicly known, turning it into a sad joke.
Day two concerned fuel prices. Another issue which should also be drawing a high level of attention is that of the fuel prices we are paying here in Malta, when seen in the context of international oil prices.
While Reuters is saying that “oil prices have been hovering around 11-year lows after falling to their lowest since mid-2004 in late December”, official sources show that we were paying €1.26 per litre of diesel on the December 28. This is the fourth highest price paid in the European Union.
When one takes the prices paid for diesel in each member state and calculates the average price, it works out at €1.13 per litre, which means that we were paying 13c per litre more than the average EU price, and 34c per litre more than the cheapest EU price for diesel. These facts and figures are screaming out that there is something rotten in the mark-up that we are being made to pay at the fuel pump.
And yet, as from the second day of this year, we were informed that fuel prices would go down, this being the second joke.
The Prime Minister relegated his New Year’s greeting to a platform for pro-Labour propaganda
Not only is it by the paltry amount of 4c a litre for diesel, but as it stands, we are still paying 13c a litre more than the EU average, and 34c more than the cheapest EU price for diesel. This means that while the government here is trumpeting about its ‘generous’ reduction in diesel prices, other EU countries have reduced their prices even lower.
I have ironically referred to these two matters as being jokes, the first two jokes of the year. One wonders what other ‘jokes’ are in store for us, although in reality they are no joke at all.
The fact that the Prime Minister relegated his New Year’s greeting to a platform for pro-Labour propaganda was already bad enough. Cooking up the whole story in the ‘kitchen that never was’ is stooping to new depths.
As regard the fuel prices, it is definitely no joke when you consider that a weekly fill-up of 30 litres of diesel means that you are paying €3.90 more than what the average price in the EU is, and €10.20 more than the country with the lowest price, which incidentally happens to be Luxembourg – the country that the Prime Minister said he is emulating in his last budget speech.
One wonders where all this extra money is going. What are we financing? The government is taking money from our right pocket, charging commission, and putting meagre change back into our left pocket.
This is being accompanied by the drumming into our minds of their so-called ‘positive’ messages and anybody who queries or asks for clarification is immediately dubbed ‘negative’.
It is not up to Muscat and his cronies however to decide what is positive and what is negative. The wool which Muscat and the Labour Party had successfully stretched to pull over people’s eyes is slowly returning back up, and the facts and the figures are becoming too loud to be ignored.
Very early in this government’s term, we had said that there is a limit to how long the people could give the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt. You just cannot treat the public as fools and hope to get away with it forever. Just because people decided to trust you does not make them fools, but there is a limit to their trust. It seems that that limit has been reached and surpassed, and many are now seeing through the elaborate and clever web of deceit which Labour had spun prior to their election.
Marthese Portelli is shadow minister on energy, environment and transport.