The day after the last general election three years ago, the government announced that Malta had joined Nato’s Partnership for Peace (PfP). Despite the controversial nature of this decision, there was no debate in Parliament about it and there had been no prior declaration of the intention to join PfP in the Nationalist Party’s manifesto.
Soon after this, still flushed with electoral victory, the Cabinet decided to award all ministers and parliamentary secretaries a hefty pay increase. Again, the decision was not debated in Parliament nor, remarkably, was any formal public announcement made about the pay rises.
What these two actions have in common is the way that Parliament was bypassed on two extremely sensitive issues. They demonstrate an unhealthy disdain for Parliament, which may hold lessons for what is now going on in the House of Representatives in the wake of the referendum on divorce and which all who care about our parliamentary democracy hope will not be repeated.
The decisive outcome of the referendum in favour of introducing divorce legislation has exposed the party in power to the charge of abdicating its responsibilities to Parliament and to the sovereign will of the people who elected them. In a fit of moral cowardice, the government decided to opt out of the decision on divorce legislation and, instead, to unburden it onto the shoulders of the electorate. It also took a calculated political decision – which backfired spectacularly – to back the power of the Church to swing the electorate in favour of a negative result.
Yet, now, having received a clear mandate to introduce divorce, a sizeable rump of members of Parliament seem inclined to renege on their commitment to let the people decide. This rump of mainly Nationalist ministers and MPs pleads conscience. But is that any longer a justified, or justifiable, position to take?
I concede that, other things being equal, there may be a perfectly respectable argument for saying that if an individual member’s conscience is troubled by the introduction of divorce legislation s/he may abstain. But that argument presupposes that MPs are performing the role for which they have been elected: that is, to debate and enact legislation for the good governance of all the people of Malta and, most pertinently, that this is done without first asking the people to take the responsibility for making the decision.
MPs decided in their collective wisdom – led by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet and with the connivance of the opposition – to abdicate their legislative responsibilities and to dump the decision into the lap of the electors. There was no question of consciences being pricked here, just a desire to wash their hands of their responsibilities in the face of a difficult decision with political consequences they could not confidently foresee.
The key question MPs now have a duty to confront, therefore, is whether their unanimous choice to relinquish the responsibilities for which they were elected to Parliament in favour of surrendering the decision to the country at large any longer allows them to plead personal conscience as an excuse for going against the sovereign, democratic will of the people. It is patently clear that by asking the people to decide the issue it becomes one not of conscience (if it ever were) but overwhelmingly of whether or not MPs’ commitment to the very essence of democracy – that the will of the majority, by whatever margin, shall prevail – should be respected.
This, as President Emeritus Eddie Fenech Adami will vividly recall, is what he fought for following the election some 30 years ago. Having invited the people’s decision, personal conscience must now give way to the democratic imperative. And their own conscience as Christian Democrats should surely tell them so.