Simon Busuttil is either not in control of his party, or his party is in control of him, or maybe both he and the party are in a vacuum. It could also be, perhaps, that the PN leader does not know his own mind and just goes the way the wind blows.
Which puts him between wind and water, to continue with being wind metaphorical.
In politics, especially at the head of a political party aspiring to lead the government, you have to be a driver, not a passenger. You have to have a mind of your own, not be a Jim Hacker.
In fact, the higher echelons of the PN seem to be riddled with ditherers. Vacillation is the name of their game. Anne Fenech voted against divorce but when the electorate embraced it in a referendum, she said she was glad the ‘yes’ had won.
Busuttil wavers just as wildly. Which is serious – who cares what Anne Fenech thinks, at least while she is in opposition? But for the PN leader to be unsure about himself – that is different. He has shown himself to be unashamedly a waverer – and who wants a waverer for prime minister – when speaking about the minimum wage.
Asked by a TVM representative what his position was on the minimum wage, the PN leader said ‘they’ had already expressed themselves on the matter.
Instead of raising the national minimum wage, there should be help for those earning that wage, who should be trained to find a better job, Busuttil replied.
“Instead of raising the minimum wage” were his words. That was on October 24. Busuttil did not agree with the idea of raising the minimum wage. It has been a tricky subject for years, and the business sector did not like the idea. The ramifications in putting more into the minimum wage are endless. And Busuttil was not one who was going to blaze a trail there.
Perhaps he was mindful also that the PN in government had taxed the minimum wage and left pensions frozen for 25 years. Sudden generosity might provoke the justified jibe that in opposition the PN knows no bounds to its liberality. Low-income earners would also recall their painful condition in the remorseless situation of utility bills. There was no generosity there.
On October 26, just two days after Busuttil rejected the idea of a minimum wage rise, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat spoke on TVM on Dissett. The time had come to raise the national minimum wage, Muscat said.
Sudden generosity might provoke the justified jibe that in opposition the PN knows no bounds to its liberality
I won’t bet on this, but had it been the late Dom Mintoff saying that, I think he would also have laid down by how much.
Muscat, however, is more circumspect. Talks would be held with all the parties involved, he said. And then announced that it would be the deputy prime minister who would be leading the talks.
So, there. The minimum wage is to be the subject of discussion between the social partners, I imagine the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development. And the talks will lead to a rise in the minimum wage.
Which put Busuttil up a stump.
On October 29, three days after the Prime Minister’s announcement, a number of NGOs launched a campaign for what they called a “decent minimum wage”. They said the current rate, of €4.20 an hour (€168.01 each week for 18-year olds, amounting to €8,736.52 a year) should be increased by 3.5 per cent each year for three years, to between €11,000 and €12,000 a year, apart from the COLA, the cost of living adjustment.
Busuttil had four days to ponder the proposal. On November 2 he appeared on Dissett, and asked by programme host Reno Bugeja whether he agreed with it, his reply was short and to the point: “Yes, I agree,” he said.
Within a week of the Prime Minister announcing the talks planned on the minimum wage, and within nine days of rejecting a minimum wage rise, Busuttil at last found his legs and agreed that the minimum wage should be higher.
The ‘no’ of nine days earlier became a ‘yes’. It took seven days to make a 180-degree turnaround, presuming Busuttil started rethinking the PN’s position after Muscat announced the talks.
“An exercise in irresponsible political opportunism, if ever there was one,” Eddie Fenech Adami’s former Infrastructure Minister, Michael Falzon, described it in MaltaToday.
Roger Mifsud is a retired journalist