Parliamentary Secretary Justine Caruana can thank her lucky stars that a mistake took place in the Gozo district vote counting in the last elections. This human error was translated into a parliamentary seat for her and subsequently further translated into the position of Parliamentary Secretary for the Rights of Persons with Disability and Active Aging.

The question here is whether Caruana was idoneous to be saddled with the role of parliamentary secretary responsible for the rights of these national minorities, which places a responsibility on her for the improvement of their quality of life and their integration in society.

Naturally, a key personal attribute of a person who occupies this position would be the ability and willingness to engage strategically with all stakeholders who can give a valid contribution towards the realisation of these aims, independently of their ideological leanings.

In the particular case of Caruana, it is known that there have been instances where her faculties of reason and judgement were overpowered by political animosity as could be seen by resultant angry verbal outbursts.

A case in point concerns the condemnable ferocious verbal attack that she launched on journalists in their line of duty as she addressed the Labour Party general conference.

Her furious facial expression, angry voice and frantic finger-pointing as she addressed the audience are still vivid in my memory and that of many others.

In that highly emotional address, Caruana said there were journalists who were not part of “our family”. She further implied that these journalists were acting maliciously as she referred to them as snakes spreading venom among people. Caruana subsequently attempted to justify her intimidating behaviour by brushing it off as something spontaneous and saying that she did not attack individual journalists.

More recently Caruana has been publicly accused by members of the Union Ħaddiem Magħqudin of adopting an aggressive and intimidating behaviour towards them. It was clained that Caruana instilled fear in these workers by threatening them during a meeting she held for them, where she also passed denigrating remarks.

These workers said their mobiles and personal bags were confiscated before the commencement of the meeting and these were not returned to them before it ended. This measure indicates that Caruana’s actions were premeditated and its scope was to eliminate the possibility of incriminating evidence surfacing against her later on.

Malta has not scored well at all on both a European and international level when it comes to respecting the rights of elderly persons

It had been further publicly claimed that at the beginning of the meeting Caruana threatened those present that if a single word spoken during the meeting was divulged they would suffer severe consequences. When one of the workers attending the meeting tried to speak out, Caruana addressed her by name and ordered her to stop. She further threatened that she would take her to the Commissioner of Police straight away.

On July 6 I attended a public consultation meeting at the Auberge de Castille that was held by the Minister for the Family and Social Solidarity Michael Farrugia, who was accompanied by Caruana. I exercised my right to make an intervention where I criticised the ministry for its lack of initiatives, but soon found myself being persistently interrupted by shouting.

I carried on and among others mentioned the government’s failure to honour its promise announced in the budget that concerned the introduction of a scheme that would allow workers to continue working on reaching retirement age. I also showed my disappointment about the complete exclusion of the Department of Gerontology of the University from the planning and running of all pre-retirement learning programmes held by the Parliamentary Secretariat in conjunction with the University.

As the shouting intensified with a number of those present insisting that I should be stopped from continuing talking, I could notice Caruana smiling directly at the audience as caught on video. Farrugia on the other hand handled the situation with maturity and told the people present that I had a right to speak and what I was saying was very important. Hats off to the minister.

Caruana also has a way of making sweeping general statements to give the impression that her secretariat is doing well, as she has done recently when she was quoted to have said in Parliament that Malta had placed first in European Union (EU) statistics, which rated the well-being of the elderly.

In reality, Malta has not scored well at all on both a European and international level when it comes to respecting the rights of elderly persons and in fact it lags behind its European counterparts in the category of employment. So much so that in the last analytical report on active ageing published by the European Commission, Malta placed 26th from amongst the 28 member states in the provision of adequate opportunity for seniors in terms of paid employment attainment.

According to the Labour Force Survey estimates released by the National Statistics Office in September, persons aged 65 years and over constitute a mere 1.6 per cent of the total labour work force. These include a number of individuals who were given a position of trust with a government ministry or parliamentary secretariat after helping the Labour Party or a candidate before the last elections.

In the Global AgeWatch study for 2015, which is derived from how well the ageing population is faring in the domains of income security, health status, capability and enabling environment, Malta has ranked last among 24 countries in Western Europe, North America and Australasia. Malta also ranked 86th amongst the 96 participating nations in the employment and educational attainment of older workers, derived from the access to the labour market and economic empowerment of older workers.

It is certainly no wonder that the newly appointed Commissioner for the Elderly, Helen Mallia, declared from the outset that her first priority would be that of helping those elderly who wished to continue working.

The benefits for the elderly and persons with disabilities can only be maximised by involving everyone who is able to give a valid contribution, independently of whether or not that someone is considered to be a part of ‘our family’ by the parliamentary secretary’s yardstick.

At the same time those employed in the elderly and persons with disabilities government sectors, and to this end all workers in the public sector, should not continue to be subjected to discriminatory treatment on the basis of their political sympathies. All workers, independently of their political orientation and party or trade union affiliation, have the right to be treated respectfully and given their due dignity.

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