While controversial topics like ministerial salaries and divorce legislation take up the headlines, the country still needed to be administered in a serious way, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said yesterday.
He then listed a number of national reforms and projects, including the privatisation of the shipyards, the paving of Bizazza Street, Sliema and the demolition of the wall around Dock Number 1, which he likened to the Berlin Wall.
“As government we must respond to criticism and take important decisions. But let us not think that while we are doing this the country is moving on autopilot,” Dr Gonzi said, during an interview on Radio 101.
He appealed to the media to cover positive stories, such as the fact that, while up to “some years ago” only 25 per cent of school leavers carried on studying, Nationalist governments had helped increase the figure to 75 per cent. Dr Gonzi said Malta was doing very well economically, although 6,000 people remained unemployed.
“Although some of these are simply dodging work, others are genuine,” he said, making special reference to the 58 workers of Selmun Palace who were recently let off amid the restructuring of struggling Air Malta, which owns the hotel.
Referring to the Opposition’s criticism that these workers were promised job security only last November, Dr Gonzi said circumstances had changed. He said the government had tried to include the workers in the sale agreement but after three years, no decent offers came through.
However, the government’s Employment and Training Centre (ETC) has now been put at the dis-posal of these 58 workers to ensure they get back into the tourism industry as soon as possible.
Dr Gonzi also made reference to Saturday’s parliamentary discussion on ministerial salaries.
Denying that things were done in a manner that lacked transparency, he laid into the Opposition for what he called a “pantomime of hypocrisy”.
The Prime Minister compared the €500 weekly raise given to Cabinet members to the fact that government workers who are elected as MPs are no longer made to give up their government employment.
This decision was taken in the last legislature, effectively meaning that an MP like Labour MP Roderick Galdes, employed with the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, got a weekly raise of €566, according to Dr Gonzi.
The controversy was reignited this year when The Times revealed that besides failing to reveal the raises to the public for two years, Cabinet ministers also awarded themselves a €6,000 higher duty allowance and did not give the same conditions to the Opposition leader and current Speaker, despite having promised them.
“We did nothing out of this world, we just have a system like the one used by the British Parliament,” he said, adding, however, that he was willing to “refine” this system. Dr Gonzi on Saturday managed to garner the support of all his MPs for a parliamentary vote to defeat an Opposition motion over ministers’ pay rises. This was after he proposed that the Select Committee to Strengthen Democracy, which is in abeyance, should start meeting again and kick off its discussions with this issue.
The Opposition had walked out of this committee last year when the PN accused Labour MP Justyne Caruana of having voted wrongly with the government on an important power station vote.
Dr Gonzi said the Labour Party had behaved like “children” when they stopped attending this committee but he was willing to “let bygones be bygones” and restart discussions without any conditions.
The Prime Minister pointed out that the Labour Party did not seem to support this idea.
Labour leader Joseph Muscat on Saturday said that his party was willing to try and revive the committee but only if those who had been treated badly were given a remedy. He did not specify what these meant.