The repeated reports on Labour outlets that this year’s electoral campaign left the party a profit upwards of €90,000 is quite unconvincing, to say the least.
The L-Aqwa Żmien Ta’ Pajjiżna campaign was as lavish as they come, and the combined efforts matched and surpassed the 2013 Labour campaign on many counts.
Billboards sprang up at virtually every junction on the islands, with a weekly change of canvas.
Suffice it to say that a friendly price for printing and fitting may set you back €300 per billboard. In addition to the dozens of roadside adverts, there was a near-complete carpeting of the web with josephmuscat.com adverts creeping up on every site, every app you tapped open.
Events and the logistical arrangements that make them happen demand a substantial portion of funds.
Consider the staging, lighting and audiovisuals, marquees and services. Expenses quickly soar into the tens of thousands of euros for each occasion.
In the second half of the campaign month, the Labour Party was putting up as many as three medium-to-large events each day.
Besides primary expenses, the Labour campaign splashed out on second-order elements too, such as an unlawful hoax website and installing a 70-metre LED screen across the entire facade of the party headquarters in Mile End Street. The Labour Party cannot be accused of not having tried hard to use up all the funds available to it.
Major features on the campaign trail were endorsements by Tony Blair and Matteo Renzi at the mass meeting on the Granaries. Muscat does enjoy a level of personal familiarity with the former Italian prime minister, but Blair’s endorsements are known to rack up fees running into six digits.
That the expenses incurred by this intense electoral campaign added up to just over €1.2 million, as the Labour Party claims, is hard to swallow
Four days later, three international artists – Amelia Lily, Damea and Harrison – headlined the after party on the final day of campaigning. Maybe the Labour Party would have us believe they too were gripped by the spirit of giving.
Throughout the campaign weeks, the Labour Party was fully staffed, with hundreds of people working the phones and knocking on doors. But, perhaps, that cost was rightly omitted from the declaration of expenses, given that the majority of the personnel were simply transferred to Blata l-Bajda from government departments and ministries, their special assignments generously funded by taxpayer money.
That the expenses incurred by this intense electoral campaign added up to just over €1.2 million, as the Labour Party claims, is hard to swallow.
Even less credible is the announcement that the five-week operation raised more funds than it forked out.
The question arises immediately: why does the Labour Party need to go to such great lengths to push the spiel that the campaign generated revenue?
One cannot fail to read this against the broader backdrop of party finance law, which the Labour Party was last to fall in line with, delaying the process until the eve of the dissolution of Parliament.
The party was in breach of the very law that the Labour government passed, making it the only political organisation in Malta withholding mandatory information on donations and income. The persistent message that the electoral campaign registered a profit does work in symmetry with Labour’s attitude to government – money-making is the measure of achievement.
Take, for example, contentious policies like the citizenship-for-cash scheme, where cultural, ethical and diplomatic issues were quashed under the prospect of making easy money.
The same logic has also been applied, in reverse, when the government tried to brush aside the growing problem of congestion on our roads.
Heavy traffic is only a result of the country’s economic success, we were told. Let’s have longer traffic jams then, if it means that the State coffers are full.
General election campaigns are by far the biggest publicity exercises in our country, and anyone with a hint of experience will instantly tell you that the bill the Labour Party claims to have had to foot is only a fraction of what its electoral campaign was really worth.
That Labour reduces its electoral campaign to a money-spinner is troubling enough. More so is the dubious declaration that the whole thing cost a relatively meagre amount and left the party some loose change, too.
Rosette Thake is the Nationalist Party’s secretary general.