For many months now we have been hearing the same question over and over again: when is the next election date? I think it is time to ask a more basic question: why should this be the Prime Minister’s prerogative? 
We should have fixed national election dates every five years. Fixed election dates will improve the fairness of our electoral system by eliminating the ability of the governing party to manipulate the timing of elections for partisan advantage. In the present system adopted from Britain our Prime Minister is able to select a date for a general election and to advise the President to dissolve Parliament. This allows the governing party to set the timing of a general election to its own advantage.
Beyond providing for greater fairness, fixed election dates will improve transparency and predictability. It will also be better for our economy that suffers unnecessarily once speculation about the next national electoral date starts. It is also better for democracy as playing around with the election date makes voters cynical and switches them off from politics. Introducing rules about setting the election date, and taking it out of the hands of the Prime Minister would be another important step in improving and modernizing our democratic institutions and practices.
Quite a number of countries operate systems of fixed election dates within limiting conditions such as the government losing a vote of confidence. We already have a system of fixed election dates for local councils and for the European Parliament and it works well. We should now have a similar system for the National Parliament.

Balconies come first
Many studies in different countries having a parliamentary democracy show the most generous budgets to be those before the election and the stingiest right after the election. In our pre-electoral season government has generously decided to extend the Timber Balcony Scheme to all Urban Conservations Areas in Malta and Gozo and to all scheduled houses. The scheme gives applicants up to 60 per cent of the money spent on restoring their timber balconies or replacing their existing one, up to a maximum of Lm600.
It is of course a popular measure. It is still not clear to me what kind of budget government has to meet the strong demand. I trawled the Financial Estimates published with the Budget for 2008 and did not find any fund to finance this national Timber Balcony Scheme. I hope that in the coming days the government will clarify the issue. I do not know how many people are set to benefit from this scheme which will not be means tested and all you need is to have a scheduled house or a house in an urban conservation area with a balcony in need of restoration.
I like wooden balconies but I would prefer the government to set its priorities right and if it has money to spare to spend it on those who have cancer rather than on those who have balconies. Some time ago I met a young mother who is going through the trauma of trying to cope with her cancer and also working hard to make money to enable her to buy the medicine Herceptin to treat her. One in every five cases of breast cancer is receptive to Herceptin, but a course of the potentially life-saving drug costs about Lm16, 000 and very few can afford it.
Data from the National Cancer Register show that 245 women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, 222 in 2004 and 218 in 2003. Little is being done by government to help them. There are new drugs (less expensive than Herceptin, but still beyond the means of most women) that may help produce dramatic disappearance of disseminated breast cancer. Government does not have money to spend on these new and very expensive cancer drugs as part of the claimed free and comprehensive National Health Scheme (NHS). Some women with breast cancer have no choice but to obtain loans to pay for their treatment.
Health Minister Louis Deguara was recently quoted as saying that making drugs freely available to cancer sufferers was a question of priorities and cost effectiveness: "If we had unlimited resources I don't think it would be a problem, but many countries, like us, have to prioritise." Apart from putting balconies ahead of cancer in its priorities, government is making matters worse by announcing a national breast screening scheme when it lacks the resources to do so and raising hopes falsely.

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