While watching Joseph Muscat on BondiPlus, I made a few notes. With minimal changes, here they are. This is only an experiment, as Alfred Sant used to say.
Muscat said that the PM "took into account opinion polls but ignored families" and he wasn't being complimentary. How does this compute: weren't the people who answered the pollsters' questions part of a family?
The famous water and electricity bills will be reduced, he said. I noted: "how? How much?" A new Government run by me, Muscat said, will go for other types of energy and then he seemed to let slip that it will be gasoil then gas. And this, of course, will be done the day after he gets elected, presumably because Citizen John's investors will wave their magic wand and get it done.
He said the PM shouldn't have promised to reduce income tax once he knew couldn't do it - if this is the case, why isn't the PM the richest man in the known universe, since according to Muscat, he knew what was coming in the financial world.
Muscat went on, and on, about Ministerial salaries, but you can check out my Beck column about that.
Amazingly for a Labour politician, he then made a funny, calling the programme "GonziPlus", apparently because Bondi kept quoting the PM and using clips of the PM's questions to Muscat. Well, I call it a funny, but I suppose it only seems like that because it came from a Labour politician, which is a change making us weep.
Muscat preened a bit and said that he answered Gonzi's 10 questions with 51 proposals - here I had to change my note slightly for publication, because "what sodding solutions!?!?!?!" is a bit rude. A wish list of 51 half-baked ideas does not constitute an answer to any question I know, let alone 10 of them.
He accused the PM of not having a background in fiscal policy and then went on to say that VAT (a tax on consumption) hits those who spend least.... "Huh?" is what I noted, probably because I am not an economist. But then, nor is Muscat.
Bondi put "the email question" to Muscat, who said that he had nothing to hide in this regard, so we'll leave it at that. After all, who am I doubt that Muscat has any idea what the PM knows about his emails to senior Government officials?
The conversation then veered into the national debt and Muscat told us that he would be working to a multi-annual budget (or something like that, economics, especially when spouted by non-economists, makes my eyes glaze) and bringing down the debt by cutting out fripperies.
He then went on to talk about how many people the Government employs, which rather makes me wonder whether he thinks employees are fripperies, which can't be the case because his is the workers' party and the unions would scream blue murder if they thought Muscat thought he could get away with treating people like commodities.
The conversation went on, and on, and on and Bondi must have started feeling like he was trying to nail jelly to the wall: for every question or point made, there was an answer, of sorts, generally one that didn't answer the question or point made, with the added benefit of some catchy technical sounding phrase in English chucked in, giving the lie to the notion that Marisa Micallef isn't earning her thirty pieces of silver or whatever princessley salary she's earning.
Muscat's closing points, for all the world on the lines of Jerry Springer in the manner so beloved of Labour, were that he was worried about Government's measures being in breach of EU Directives, which I thought was a touching reversal of his previous views on the EU and the evil inherent in it.