The Labour Party will be resisting the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (Acta) and will only accept it if it is accompanied by the necessary safeguards, Labour leader Joseph Muscat said this morning.
It is being claimed that the agreement will control internet content but the European Commission is denying these claims.
Speaking in Mosta in the first of a series of talks as part of the party's local elections campaign, Dr Muscat said this agreement could also be problematic for pharmaceutical companies in Malta which produced generic medicine.
The government, however, said that it was nothing to worry about. But the people were not believing it.
GonziPN, Dr Muscat said still operated the old way. But public opinion now formed on its own, independently from politics.
Dr Muscat said that few had noticed, but the Opposition had this week taken a “difficult” decision to support the government on changing the Constitution for the EU’s fiscal pact despite the political circumstances.
When in 1998 the Labour government was also in a crisis, the PN Opposition chose not to support a simple decision of creating the Malta Tourism Authority, even though it had agreed with the concept.
Dr Muscat said today’s Opposition chose to be responsible instead of adopting “yesterday’s politics” to make the Prime Minister look bad, because it was in the national interest to safeguard the country’s credibility.
Earlier, he spoke on the forthcoming local elections saying these were another tough test for the Labour Party, which the Nationalist government was using to its advantage by adding Sliema to this year's list, putting Labour at a disadvantage.
On Mosta, he said that the residents were disappointed with their council for many years and the PL shouldered responsibility for the internal squabbling which had been detrimental to the team spirit within the council.
The council started working really well only recently and had it started earlier, it would have delivered much more.
"But we are here to tell the people of Mosta that we have learned our lesson and we have taken the decisions for a new Mosta council to work more for the benefit of residents.
"Mosta is a tough locality for Labour but it we are ready to face the challenger and shoulder the responsibility."
Councils, Dr Muscat said, cannot continue to be a wall of bureaucracy.
He spoke on the PN election for party leader later this month and pointed out that the Prime Minister considered his party's rules to be irrelevant as he failed to make his post vacant before calling the election for a leader.
"If party rules were irrelevant for the PM, how did he consider the people and the rules of democracy," Dr Muscat asked.
He said Nationalists now admitted it was now not enough to be a nationalist but one also needed to be part of the clique.
Dr Muscat said likened the situation regarding value added tax to usury saying that fines and interests were costing the self-employed more than the actual tax and some were ending in prison as a result, since they were not being able to pay their dues. A new Labour government, he said, would give the system an overhaul.