European Commissioner John Dalli said this evening that he was sorry to see that the Maltese parliament was not functioning as it should.
"Parliament is an important institution which, I feel, is being disfigured, and that is bad for the country," he told Norman Hamilton during an interview on Bla Agenda, carried on One.
Mr Dalli was also asked to give his views on the current controversy on raising the minimum wage.
He said there was a difference between raising the minimum wage and giving the cost of living adjustment.
As Minister of Finance for 10 years, he never raised the minimum wage. Nor was it raised before or since. But the government always gave the cost of living increase.
Raising the minimum wage would trigger major costs for the government as many salary scales as well as pensions and other benefits were calculated on it, Mr Dalli said.
He did not know if the minimum wage would be raised in the forthcoming budget, but he hoped that if that was the case, complex calculations on the consequences were made beforehand, unless the government had struck oil or some new major source of revenue.
In his long interview Mr Dalli repeated his view that the government's former emphasis on fair distribution of wealth appeared to have been replaced by policies which siphoned wealth to particular sectors.
He insisted that he, as a nationalist, believed in full, true democracy centred around the individual, a democracy which included a well functioning court and well functioning police and broadcasting, and where there was fair distribution of wealth.
He also reiterated that he believed his e-mails and those of his staff and family had been hacked, but he said it was difficult to trace the source, although he could wait.
Mr Dalli said be felt the PN was being run by a system akin to apartheid where one felt out of place if he did not obey. He was always one of several Nationalists who thought with their minds and cherished the right to criticise without being accused of disloyalty. What was disloyal, he said, was to applaud actions which one knew to be wrong.