Recently the Labour Party announced its plan, called LEAD, to feminise politics through the gradual increase of its women candidates for local, national and European elections. This plan includes providing training, mentoring and support to young women who wish to take the plunge into the local political sludge.
Labour may wish to start even closer home by feminising its own decision-making organs – it lags behind the Nationalist Party in having women in senior party positions. This notwithstanding, LEAD is a good idea. In focusing on long-term capacity-building it stands to make a bigger impact on the gender balance in politics than the different forms of positive discrimination that have been bandied about.
Any form of positive discrimination is ultimately condescending. As we have seen from the European Parliament elections, when working conditions for parliamentarians include adequate compensation and actually take into account the realities of working mothers, there is no shortage of contenders and successful women politicians. If Parliament wants more women MPs, it should ditch once and for all its lingering legacy of a gentlemen’s club (in the original, pre-Paceville sense of the word) meant only for part-time professionals.
The feminisation of Maltese politics is not the only energetic start of this legislature. Government bulldozed through the Marriage Equality cum surrogacy preparation Act. The new roads minister has hit the road(s) with a turbo-charged determination to wipe away the memory of his predecessor’s ineptitude, and no tree will stand in his way. Air Malta has reversed its previous anorexic tendencies, although quite where Minister Konrad Mizzi’s neoliberal agenda will take it is still unclear.
The Prime Minister himself is trying to project a new image of doing things. He has decided to ditch the self-hiring of his own car, and has proclaimed a new season of goodwill to all in the President’s speech at the opening of the new legislature. Anton Refalo has been replaced, and rightly so, by Justyne Caruana as Minister for Gozo.
This government’s good ideas and flashes of good governance cannot hide the cancer festering at the OPM
Yet, as hard as the government tries to project the image of industrious normality sanctioned by its overwhelming electoral victory, there is a smell of fakeness in the air. As one hand of government gets on with governing, the other continues to undermine the rule of law with nonchalant brutishness.
We received confirmation that the police had not acted on FIAU reports and that key and highly respected FIAU personnel have been summarily removed when investigations came too close to the Prime Minister. That employment regulations and possibly electoral laws have been flouted to buy votes.
In the meantime, the government does not even try to justify the political and punitive transfers taking place. The (truly) independent media is now regularly ignored and considered as part of the vanquished enemy. Pilatus Bank continues to trade and the Malta Financial Services Authority is mute and possibly blind.
It had to be the Leader of the Opposition to finally get the courts to look at the whole Panama scandal. Government threw any last remaining shred of dignity to the winds by ordering its pudgy rottweiler Commissioner Lawrence Cutajar to chase after Dr Busuttil for daring to raise the matter at all.
This government’s good ideas and flashes of good governance cannot hide the cancer festering at the OPM. Its goodly apple is still rotting at the core. Now that it has won the election, why is it still acting like it has something to hide?
Balzunetta elephant
Two weeks ago my CCBLSLP (cisgender child-bearing legally sanctioned life-partner), a.k.a my wife, and I went to see the much-heralded Balzunetta Towers show. In a satire on Malta’s environmental hypocrisy and cupidity, Donald Trump Jr and a conniving kuntrattur buy out the Church, the Police and finally the last barmaid of Floriana’s Balzunetta to raze the whole red-light/religious/police neighbourhood and construct two 100-storey towers.
There is much to praise about this latter-day cabaret. Domenic Galea’s music and Albert Marshall’s lyrics were memorably entertaining, and currently my favourite in-car CD. The ever-green Doreen Galea was a pleasure to see and hear, as was the band, dancers, singers and actors generally.
But what really stuck at the gullet was how the script criticised all and sundry, except the biggest perpetrator and enabler of environmental rape – the government itself. Not only: the show, paid for by public funds, incorporated Labour 2013 and 2017 political slogans without any hint of irony or self-deprecation. I half-expected the Brigata Laburista to come on stage for the final hurrah.
The whole point of political theatre, which is what Balzunetta aspired to be underneath its earthy frolics, is that it is written by the powerless to satirise the powerful. When you are the establishment and try to masquerade as the other side, your inevitable blindness and rationalisation turn the disarming laughter of satire into the rictus of sycophancy. You cannot ignore the elephant in the room, because you are the elephant. The joke is on you.