On Wednesday morning, Alfred Sant revealed a damning Cabinet report which shows how another PN government led by Dr Gonzi will end free healthcare for all. The report entitled ‘Health Financing Reform’, presented to the Cabinet in December 2004 shows how the Cabinet “agreed in principle” to introduce fees for the provision of health care or health support services to Maltese or foreign citizens.
The report, discussed and approved by the Gonzi Cabinet, says: “Fees imposed by regulations for the provision of health care or health support services to Maltese or foreign citizens. The Cabinet has agreed in principle to this concept, but fees for Maltese citizens will not be introduced for the moment due to their political underpinnings.”
In plain English this means: yes we will start charging for health care provision but for the time being it is not politically expedient to announce such a decision.
GonziPN has been concealing his real intentions to start charging for health care of re-elected. A big bill-board with two kids kissing their grandmother declared: “a top quality healthcare service for free”.
During the press conference on Wednesday Alfred Sant showed clips of Gonzi strongly denying, on three different occasions, that he ever had discussions in Cabinet about imposing fees on healthcare.
Sant was right to say: “Gonzi lied and kept lying to the Maltese people over and over again. There is a problem of trust in the person who has to date led the country for the last years. The people deserve better.”

PN voters choosing Labour
I have spent most of this electoral campaign visiting the homes of families who have always voted PN but will be voting Labour on Saturday for the first time. This is the fifth general election I am contesting and the mood I find in the homes I visit is very similar to the one I found way back in 1996 when Dr Eddie Fenech Adami boasted to his closest officials at Castille on the eve of the general election that the PN would get 20,000 votes more than Labour, and then ended being defeated by 8,000 votes.
I ask these former PN voters: why are you choosing Labour this time? Invariably I get variations of the same answer: because we are fed up of corruption, arrogance and the way the well connected get preferential treatment even if they do not deserve it. It is time for a change.

Writing on the wall
In September 2004 a PN Commission set up to analyze the PN defeat in the elections for the European Parliament had concluded that throughout 2003, the PN failed to take any new bold and imaginative initiatives to renew itself.
“The Party should have started making itself seem to be on the side of the people, and not defend those who the people feel are responsible for wasting public funds, and for taking strange and unfair decisions, persons who are perceived by the general public, to be untouchable and who in most cases occupy positions they have neither the qualifications nor the skills for.”
The PN Commission concluded that the main reason for the electoral defeat in June 2004 was the loss of credibility of the PN because “of the many promises of Government, of the Party and the Candidates, that were never delivered, and that should not have been promised in the first place as they could not be delivered.”
The Commission stressed more than once that the PN lost credibility, as before the 2003 general election “many promises of every kind were made, promises that were not delivered. Many of the PN activists who spoke to the Commission expressed their concern that the Party in Government had lost its ‘soul’…Even top party officials admitted to us that they feel that the PN has lost the ‘high moral ground’, which means that the party has cut itself off from the values it embraces.”
More than three years have passed since the Commission delivered its recommendations to the Prime Minister and PN leader Dr Lawrence Gonzi. How many of the 50,000 voters who abandoned the PN in June 2004 believe that in these last years Dr Gonzi has managed to renew the PN, to recover the party’s ‘soul’, to remove all the cronies referred to in the report and to give the people of Malta and Gozo a better life?
The electoral campaign conducted by Gonzi PN is actually making our politics smaller, pettier and more trivial, as Gonzi PN goes around promising heaven on earth to everybody, distorting and lying about Labour proposals instead of engaging in an intelligent debate about them and trying to recover its lost votes not by coming out with big ideas on how to transform the nation but by indulging in an orgy of clientelism to keep its core voters from abandoning it.