MP Owen Bonnici stepped in to represent the Labour Party during a students’ debate scheduled for party deputy leaders yesterday.
Nationalist deputy leader Simon Busuttil expressed his surprise over Labour’s decision to send Dr Bonnici instead of one of the PL’s two deputy leaders.
When contacted, a PL spokesman said Louis Grech was unwell while Toni Abela was unavailable because of pre-vious commitments.
The three party representatives faced a number of questions posed by the KSU moderator and covered a number of subjects. The calm debate contrasted with recent loud leaders’ debates at the University of Malta and the Malta College for Arts Science and Technology.
Dr Busuttil said stipends were an important investment but it will not extend them to repeaters since there was a limit to how much money could be spent on them.
Dr Busuttil said: “We are aware of the fact that stipends already form a substantial amount of, and take up an important part of government’s budget. We extended stipends to all forms of education… but we reward those who work and move forward. You can not keep adding, adding, adding. There is a certain limit,” he said.
For this reason, he said, the PN did not agree with Labour’s proposal to given stipends to repeaters.
The PN, he added, had other stipend-related proposals such as increasing the stipend according to cost of living and increasing them for disabled students and those from low-income families.
Throughout the event, Dr Busuttil said the PN’s track record spoke for itself and was a guarantee that the party could be trusted to create jobs and a sound economy. The PN government, he said, suffered politically because the Malta Environment and Planning Authority did not grant permits to certain people, many times because of environ-mental concerns.
The PN kept the environment and planning together within the Mepa structure and now the PL wanted to split them, he said.
Dr Bonnici said Labour would prioritise the environment and, splitting planning from the environment would allow the environment to have a louder voice.
Dr Bonnici asked students to give the PL a chance, stressing that a Labour government would work with anyone, irrespective of political beliefs.
Alternattiva Demokratika deputy leader Carmel Cacopardo said the Government was contributing to precarious jobs by granting tenders to companies which under-paid employees.
On the environment, Mr Cacopardo wanted to protect what was left of it. Instead of condemning those who squatted at Armier, the PN said they could have legal rights while the PL was meeting the squatters to find a solution and accommodate them, he said.