Labour leader Joseph Muscat said today that on the issue of migration, the national interest came first, and he had not seen any 'mainstream reports' about poor conditions of migrants in Libya.

Dr Muscat was replying to questions by James Debono in an interview on One Radio.

He also insisted that the Maltese people ‘will not be made to pay' for the decisions taken by the government on the extension of the power station at Delimara.

"The people will not pay for this incompetence," Dr Muscat said. "The people will also not pay for people who stole from the Maltese people," he added. He said the PL would await the EU's actions on this issue before announcing its own decisions.

Dr Muscat said that while be backed the introduction of divorce, Malta needed to discuss what form of divorce should be adopted.

He had made his views known, Dr Muscat said. Dr Gonzi had not made up his mind.

But the issue at the next election, he said, should not be whether or not divorce should be introduced, but whether the country was to continue to have a government which would have been there for 25 years. Did the people want to have more of Lawrence Gonzi, Austin Gatt, David Spiteri Gingell, Zaren Vassallo and the others?

Dr Muscat said the Labour Party's withdrawal from a parliamentary committee on democratic change should not be blamed for a lack of progress on the issue of state funding and transparency in political parties. The government never ever needed the opposition to move legislation, he said. Furthermore, the Galdes Report (presented in the early 1990s) formed a good basis on which to move forward.

Furthermore, Dr Muscat said, the people were already funding the PN through a system how people who were awarded public contracts made contributions to the PN, something which was never denied.

Dr Muscat, despite being asked, did not disclose the PL's debt position but said the accounts would be published in January, with the PL being the only major party to do so.

Turning to the controversy at Sliema council, Dr Muscat insisted that the Labour councillors' backing of a motion against Cyrus Engerer, who was nominated to become deputy mayor, had nothing to do with gay issues.

He said the PL had noted parallels in the actions of the PN and the police in the case involving former Sliema Mayor Nikki Dimech. That, he said, underlined the need for an independent investigative structure in certain cases, as had already been proposed. One system, he said, could be to have investigative magistrates. This also applied for cases of corruption. The Commission against Corruption was a joke and had never found any corruption.

UNFAIR DISMISSAL OF POLICEMEN

Dr Muscat said he would not go into the merits of the case where three policemen were found by the courts to have been unfairly dismissed. However, he said, it was shocking that these people were not informed that they had been under investigation and were never given the opportunity to explain their side of the story before being dismissed.

Therefore, it was just as shocking that the Minister of Justice and former Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami had claimed that this case was dismissed by the courts on the basis of technicalities. This case, Dr Muscat said, had been dismissed on the basis of principles which the PN itself used to fight for in the past.

On taxation, Dr Muscat hit out at the government for not keeping its promise to slash income tax at its first budget. That promise, he said, had been made in the electoral campaign at the same time as the PN said that global economic woes were on the horizon. There was, therefore, no excuse for its failures.

A Labour government's aim, he said, was to grow the economy and raise tax revenue in that manner.

"We need more cows, rather than milking the current cows more".

Labour, he said, would also start a gradual shift of taxation from tax on work to tax on pollution.

As for calls to raise the minimum wage, Dr Gonzi said that Malta should be at the forefront of action to introduce the ‘living wage' established on the basis of what a worker needed to support his family, a concept currently being discussed among the socialist parties.

On immigration, Dr Muscat said the national interest needed to be safeguarded.

Dr Muscat said he had not seen a humanitarian crisis in Libya with regard to migrants. Nor had he seen mainstream reports on migrants' conditions in Libya.

He believed that migrants should be treated with dignity, but those who came to Malta should come in a legal way. Certainly, the number of migrants who had been coming to Malta was unsustainable and the national interest needed to be protected.

One could not ignore a social time bomb in order to be politically correct, and for him the national interest came first, Dr Muscat said.