Well I never thought it would be so bloody boring.
Skateboarding ceremonies with infuriated BMX aficionados (1), a visit to a pigsty (2), cycle rides for greens (3), and choreographed meetings (4) hosted by political impresarios (5). To add to the theatrics, hysterical females (6) typing out ill-thought comments on blogs and persistent letter-writers (7) repeating the same rhetoric to impatient newspaper editors.
There is really nothing to write home about but in the absence of anything better to do, here we go.
The week started off with Mario Demarco pasted onto the Economic Update’s front cover. He had the same kind of treatment five years ago on the front page of the Circle – please note – same publisher, and the same newspaper.
Mario is not a bad guy and neither is he someone who has nothing to contribute, but I feel very uncomfortable with this dynasty business. He could at least change his vocal intonation. It sounds just like that of his father.
Just look at Beppe Fenech Adami. He neither has his father’s voice, and to put it politely, nor does he have his father’s aura. But there you go: both Mario and Beppe will make it because there is something we call voting by genetic default.

Operation Demolition
This was a week that started with Operation Demolition.
Yes, demolish the greens. Send a message to the disgruntled Nationalists that a vote for the greens is a waste of time. Intelligently and in a rather Machiavellian manner, Gonzi announced that he would take over MEPA and that he would not form a coalition with the Greens.
This was Gonzi at his best. And by best I mean at his political best and his most democratic worst.
The Greens of course will have a hard time unless the Cacopardo factor works wonders and helps them regain ground.
But what I cannot fathom is the reluctance of the PN to hit out not only at Michael Falzon, but most of all at Josie Muscat.

Josie on a suicide mission
Here is Mr Suicide Mission supported by Anglu Xuereb, the Naxxar contractor who does not live in Naxxar and who owes hundred of thousands in Maltese liri to the Maltese government and is facing eviction orders.
Josie Muscat has scared the living daylights out of the people at Stamperija. His populist antics are attracting support, and even though he is not registering anything in the polls there may be some force sizeable enough to destabilise the PN. But Joe Saliba and cohorts have decided not to hit out at him, to look the other way and hope that he will evaporate into thin air.
But he will not.
The other day he announced on public broadcasting that he would not give social benefits to single mothers. Last year his clinics and his hospital hosted 32 single mothers (see Illum for full story). Obviously each and every one of them paid for the services at his private hospital. He will take money from them but he disagrees with supporting them. You see, single mothers are like the folks at the open centre, who according to Mr Suicide Mission do not deserve our help.
Last year alone, there were 742 births from single mothers. If my math is correct, that is around 25% of all births in 2007. Even if there was one single birth, we cannot abdicate from our duty to help people in need.
Wonder of wonders, Paul Vincenti, the self-declared CEO of pro-life organisation Gift of Life, has made it his business to kick a fuss about the unborn and the sacredness of ova, but zilch about Josie’s absurd politics over single mothers.
Whether we like it or not, single mothers are part of our society. They are our citizens, they pay tax, and in a modern society the State has an obligation to lend a hand to all those who need it.
Josie’s bigotry has not gone unnoticed, but Joe Saliba in his wisdom has chosen not to attack and instead direct all his peashooters on the Greens. Jason Micallef, true to himself and true to the fact that Labour is not really Labour after all, has kept his big mouth shut. For them Josie can only eat into the PN. So leave him alone, that’s his policy.
The issue here is not whether someone says something unbelievably stupid but whether the issue will bring in or lose votes. No wonder so many people are saying they will not vote.
Josie Muscat’s party does not stop here. The candidates include people who are either in court over long overdue payments running in the hundreds of thousands of liri, or who, as is the case with Paul Salomone, is accused of incitement to racial hatred. You may also remember his suggestion to a crowd of neo-fascists in Valletta that he would strangle me with my own newspaper.
But never mind. I guess Josie’s moral crusade includes lynching and hanging liberals from lampposts at no cost at all.
To add to all this colour we have Anglu Xuereb. He is probably or undoubtedly the most impressive of all the political speakers on TV. His delivery is so awful, that I really have to rush for mute on my zapper every time he makes an appearance. Otherwise I simply break into tears.
Anglu Xuereb has announced through a billboard that he will close down the open centre in Balzan. I really do not attend church services in Naxxar with the same fervour as Mr Xuereb does, neither do I pretend to be a Christian like Mr Xuereb. But if this is our idea of Christianity than give me Taoism any day.
Everyone’s response to Josie Muscat and his band of right-wing deviants is to boycott them and isolate them. The Archbishop for one should stop smiling and speak up, instead of talking metaphors over how we should love each other with Jesus here and Jesus there.
Having Josie throw up over mixed marriages, foreigners, and single mothers as if they were the scourge of society is far worse than all the venial sins practised by our Maltese teens.
Josie is bad news and we need to come together to stamp this deviant party out of the Maltese system.

Michael Falzon and the swimming pool
I was, shall we say, over the moon this week, watching political footage. There I could see the frail Alfred Sant keeping a brave face in the shivering cold. I could not believe my eyes when this very week on two separate occasions, he turned to a crowd in his inimitable humourless style and asked who in this crowd ever owned a swimming pool, to take a jibe at a recent comment by Lawrence Gonzi.
He went further. He said that anyone who did have their personal duck pond (my words) should raise their hand. There were cries and screams just like the hamalli at Qormi who greeted Lawrence Gonzi last Sunday. Different DNA, but the same molecular structure undoubtedly.
To my amazement I was waiting for Michael Falzon, the deputy leader of the Labour party to raise his hand to attention and wave to Sant.
Michael, who talks about the plight of his brothers and sisters and the wonderful world of socialism, of course has a swimming pool in his Iklin abode. Nothing wrong with that, but why did he not raise his hand?
Well, the story goes on. Or does it?

Trusting the green lobby
The deafening silence of Vince Attard, Nature Trust’s representative on MEPA, about the boathouses at Dwejra in Gozo is rather significant. He has said that he thought that the removal of the boathouses would do more damage than good. It is like saying that amputating a gangrenous leg will do more damage than good. Tell a surgeon that.
Vince is not my kind of green. And I am also quite surprised that other green organisations chose to say nothing.
In my long experience with Green NGOs, I have always been impressed by their strong ties to the PN and their aversion to AD. Strange, but true. There is nothing wrong with that either, which is perhaps why the PN is more sensitive to green issues than the MLP.
But what has happened at Dwejra has shown (a) that the election is just round the corner; (b) that Nature Trust should be ashamed of themselves; (c) that the reforms that the PM wishes to implement at MEPA might also include informing himself of the correct criteria for issuing permits. One such criteria is to freeze all applications in the four weeks prior to an election.
I will offer my left leg or perhaps the hanging pieces around my groin to be convinced that none of the boathouse owners talked or approached or winked or waved or smiled to Giovanna Debono, the Gozo minister who pesters everyone in the former cabinet about her constituency.
But just listen to Vince Attard’s comment to MaltaToday. It sounds surreal but it’s true. He said: “The disturbance created by having trucks entering the area to demolish the boathouses would have created a greater damage.” He also pointed out that any demolition would have endangered an endemic plant growing on the rubble next to the boathouses and that the disturbance would have endangered the pebble beach.
It is of course bollocks. The off-roading in the area, the trappers and hunters that are allowed to do what they wish with public land, the dumping and the vandalism in the area, are the real problems. Removing the boathouses would have raised this international acclaimed area to a new level of indescribable beauty. It would also have sent a very clear message that all those who squat on public land cannot get away with murder.
Vince is the kind of guy who will let the artificial manmade bastions fall apart because of an endemic plant that eats away at the globigerina. He thinks that conservation should only be seen through the eyes of a botanist. Conservation is about being holistic.
He has done worse. He has eaten away at any respect I had for Nature Trust. The boathouse owners now trust Nature Trust. I, I’m afraid, do not.

What a bad campaign!
And now back to Labour, which believes it has a very good campaign. Well, it had better start looking at the polls. Because whether it likes it or not, the PN is making gains and spectacular ones. The game plan at Mile End is to keep a low-key profile and be as non-committal as possible.
So if Sant is asked about hunting he says: we will decide when we come to it. The rest of his answers are all half-baked. On the surcharge, he says: we will see when we come to businesses.
I have the feeling that when we do come to any thorny question, Sant will have the same packaged answer: we will come to it in due course. He has every right to keep mum about things. But he cannot expect us to write about his campaign if the only exciting thing that happened this week was that Michael Falzon didn’t raise his hand to say that he the socialist, he the family loving man, he the man suffering from too much chlorine in his duck pond, has a swimming pool.
There is also this half-baked approach to allegations of corruption. As much as I think that Jesmond Mugliett should have resigned, I do not say that he is corrupt; rather, I would say that he was politically responsible for the mess at ADT.
The issue with his partner Robert Sant is also not an issue of corruption but one of conflict of interest. And to be fair to poor Jesmond, he did declare his revenue from his firm.
And what is the big deal that he was seen eating with Robert Sant, as we were kindly illustrated on One News? What does that prove?
Shall I list down the people who are Charles Mangion’s clients and who also love to eat with him at the Hilton? Or the friends and acquaintances of Silvio Parnis during his late-night adventures? Or the people who dine and wine with so many other parliamentarians? What does this prove?
Nothing.
So if we are going to come strong on corruption let us come up with some serious stuff. I could give a few examples. I agree with Labour that there must be a political, together with administrative, responsibility when mistakes are committed. But this is all about codes of ethics, not corruption. Corruption is when someone gives you cash to look the other way; corruption is when you favour one person to another; corruption is when you encourage people to break the law.

Libels
The spate of libel cases in this election campaign continues to rise. It is a sad affair. I am not talking about libels against this newspaper, but about the cross-party tradition of sending citations to each other during election time.
It seems to prove the belief that libel law is a fundamental that should stay with us. It should not.
Libel should be resorted to if someone utters the most ludicrous and untrue statement about someone. Not if someone makes a value judgement.
And even if this was not the case, the law needs to be changed to upgrade the role of the press ethics commission, a commission that should otherwise have the power to debar a journalist from his profession or to issue such a heavy worded rebuke that anyone brought before the commission should feel ashamed of. But of course, that would first mean giving journalists the power to self-regulate their profession, and not letting the DOI issue press cards to all and sundry.
As things stand, the only way for the libel law to be changed is for the next home affairs minister to have the vision, or shall we say the foresight to change the press laws and bring them up to date with this century.
Just imagine for a split second that the next home affairs minister turns out to be Michael Falzon. Ommi ma!

Chetcuti Caruana
My final thoughts go to the Labourite Mosta mayor Paul Chetcuti Caruana, a former Labour MP whose political resurrection came years later after being all but forgotten and thankfully never taken seriously for his flippant political remarks.
He is now a mayor and his latest pronouncement that he will not officiate civil marriages and proposing that couples who wish to wed should undergo Cana lessons and go to the Church proves how in synch with social democratic and liberal beliefs our Labour friends happen to be.
To add insult to injury, Chetcuti Caruana is quoted as saying, ‘this is New Labour’ and not Old Labour. Which is a pity, because if there is anything to praise Dom Mintoff for, are surely his social reforms and his insistence on separating the role of the State from the Church. In 1975 Mintoff had the gall to introduce civil marriage. Chetcuti Caruana makes a mockery of the achievements of his own party.
I am starting to wonder whether Chetcuti Caruana’s DNA has mutated into that of a Nationalist before 1975.
Saviour Balzan is writing a daily commentary on www.maltatoday.com.mt and invites readers to give their comments. Dive in now!

References:
1.Gonzi at Msida circus
2. Alfred Sant in Gozo at a pigsty
3. AD running around on bicycles
4. Michael Falzon blowing kisses to the crowd on Valentine’s day
5. Pablo and Eileen interviewing Gonzi
6. Daphne
7. Eddie Privitera, Edward Torpiano, Valerie Borg and Giovanni Demartino

 

sbalzan@mediatoday.com.mt