The Labour machine has gone into overdrive screaming out that the reason to vote Labour, notwithstanding its tainted stint in power, is to maintain stability and keep the economy going. Those seem to be the mainstays of their pitch to the Maltese people, who they want to reaffirm them in their reign of gain.

We should look very closely at these two hollow assertions, starting with the most blatant of these false claims, namely stability. It is surreal that a caretaker Prime Minister, who has hysterically called an early election after not being able to carry out his full term due to serious allegations of corruption, should claim stability as his battle cry.

It sounds to me like an arsonist claiming to be a firefighter. Instability in the government has been the order of the day for the past four years, with the destabilisation of institutions, with one after another police commissioners coming and, very quickly, going. Our land has been given away to foreign interests, while our national identity was put up for sale to the highest bidders, irrespective of where their money was coming from. Salaries for hundreds of positions of trust were thrust on the taxpayers’ bill, while our electricity is dependent upon a floating bomb, how’s that for stability?

The economy is booming, they say, and government accounts are in surplus. What has caused this? What new project, economical sector or major investment has caused this happy state of affairs? The main drivers of the economy are the financial services and the online gambling sectors, two areas of economic activity that were born, nurtured and developed under successive PN administrations.

The government has taken the country away from the traditional partisan divide, to a new divide, that between the honest and the dishonest

Joseph Muscat is playing the cuckoo and enjoying the nest that others built, claiming it for his own after having deceitfully pushed the true owners of this success aside. The surplus did not materialise out of more efficient tax gathering, or increased government revenue, and even less so from a decreased public wage bill, where rather the contrary has occurred. Its origins lie in a simple stroke of the pen whereby Joseph Muscat chose to just put a halt to all capital spending on the infrastructure, thus allowing everything to remain in the state he found it, which must have been pretty good since he decided to leave it as it was.

That does not in any way mean that his unilateral action is justified, as it is tantamount to someone handling household accounts and making ends meet by not paying utility bills. It will feel okay for the initial period, but it will come back full circle and bite one in the proverbial behind.

The myths of the Labour sales spin having been so easily debunked, one must see what is being offered by the Nationalist Party. Much less spin, much more substance. In essence, the corner stone of our election proposals is honesty, so often described as being the best policy. We are proposing honesty in the management of our country’s assets, be they financial, environmental, capital and, most importantly, human.

We are offering to ensure that our constitutional institutions are made tamper-proof, and in a position to be able to effectively control the government of the day, free from any influence through threat or promise of favour. We are proposing giving back dignity to our reputation, which has been tarnished so badly by the recurrent stories doing the world rounds about our country.

The most important thing is that we want to win back our country from the hands of the corrupt few, and render it back to the people, to all the people. We recognise and proclaim that as politicians we consider the Maltese people to be our master, and that we are there to serve the people, and not to be served by them.

It is for those reasons, that June 3 is a day of reckoning for us as a people. These past four years have seen a government which has taken the country away from the traditional partisan divide, to a new divide, that between the honest and the dishonest. I am convinced that honesty still holds the pride of place as the majority in this country of ours.

Charlot Cassar is a Marsascala councillor and Nationalist Party election candidate.

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