Prime Minister Joseph Muscat this morning congratulated new PN leader Adrian Delia and said he would invite him for a meeting to see how they could work together.
Half-way through a speech in Zebbuġ, Dr Muscat said he would be inviting the new PN leader as soon as he returns from the US, where he will be addressing the UN General Assembly.
What he hoped for, he said, was a change of attitude: Would the PN continue to be negative, or would there be a change of tone, even if it disagreed? A small initial test, he said, would be whether Dr Delia would reverse a PN decision not to participate in a committee that would decide Malta's waste management options.
READ - Labour condemns PN for opting out of waste-to-energy committee
He said Malta needed an Opposition that was coherent and started to take positions, and not sit on the fence.
Simon Busuttil’s last speech on Friday showed exactly why the PN had lost the election. It was a display of arrogance where it seemed that everyone was bribed or corrupt, the Prime Minister charged.
It had been said that the PN chose Dr Delia because it could not choose any better. But Malta had a choice and was continuing to choose the best, Dr Muscat said.
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Migration march – ‘Hatred is not the answer’
Dr Muscat briefly weighed in on the issue of social tensions in communities with large migrant populations, saying hatred would solve nothing.
The mayors of Marsa, Ħamrun, Paola, Pietà, Msida, Gżira and Floriana all boycotted a “solidarity walk” held in Marsa this morning after it was taken over by far-right activists.
Dr Muscat thanked the mayors and assured that the government would not shy away from finding an amicable solution to the situation.
A government looking forward
This, Dr Muscat said, was the essence of this administration: “we do not shy away from progress”.
The Prime Minister dedicated the bulk of his speech to detailing how he planned to continue pushing the country to new frontiers, as he did not want to rest on the successes of the first legislature.
“Many will say, ‘why change things? Just keep things the way they are and ensure another electoral win’. But that is not what this movement is about,” he said.
This, he said was true when Labour talisman Dom Mintoff had campaigned for Malta to no longer remain a colony.
This Dr Muscat said was why the government wanted to challenge the status quo, to discuss challenges, not sweep them under the rug.
He wanted to build an infrastructure to handle the future population and not just today’s, to build a social infrastructure too.
“And I want to continue eradicating poverty. We dealt it the first blow in the first few years, now let’s give it the fatal strike,” he said.
Branding the Labour government as “reformist” he said that was why people had voted for.
Taking another slight dig at the PN he said Labour had only been able to do this because it was a united movement.
Being united, he said, did not mean agreeing on everything, but having a shared set of principles and values on what you want to achieve for the country.
Blockchain nation
Dr Muscat said cryptocurrencies was one of the things he wanted the island to be at the forefront off.
Telling the crowd of supporters that the virtual currency system was something they would soon be hearing a lot about, he said he wanted people to think of Malta when they hear the word Blockchain.
“We want to be trail blazers,” he said.
Prostitution
The Prime Minister then turned to plans for a reform of laws on prostitution, saying although this issue would win him no votes, it was something he could not allow to go on any longer.
He said the US State Department report that regularly classifies Malta as a centre of human trafficking, was what prompted him to push for reform. “We have women from the East, in this country being sold as slaves of the sex trade. This in a country that has a church for every day of the year? Can we let this go on? That would be hypocrisy. Irrespective of what we think about this issue on a moral level, it is primarily about protecting victims,” he said.
Today’s legal approach, he said, had failed, but there were other models such as the Nordic system in which the prostitute does not face criminal action but the client does. Other models also needed discussing.
“The Opposition has said we should leave things as they are – but we can see that the system we have is not working, and I will not shy away from this,” he said.