Thank God for PQs: those wonderful little inventions that our members of parliament occasionally throw at each other to give the impression that they’re actually doing some work.
I must say, if ever I dreamed of becoming an MP (yes, I do suffer from nightmares occasionally) it would be for no other reason than to excogitate new and unlikelier parliamentary questions with which to waste the House’s time.
Things like: Would the honourable Minister kindly tell us how many litres of Angelik Caruana’s own blood were shed in tears by his statue of Our Lady in the period between 1992 and 2005? What is the precise distance a Malta-flagged fishing boat can travel on a gallon of diesel: more, or less than the half-mile that separates the Xemxija coast from the nearest tuna pen?
Or if all else fails, the old classic: how many MPs does it take to change an energy-saving light bulb? (To which the answer is: None, because the five free ones we were all promised before the election – light bulbs, not MPs – spectacularly failed to materialise.)

But just to be extremely generous with our existing 65... sorry, 73 MPs, it must also be remarked that sometimes, ever so occasionally, they will come up with a PQ which might conceivably serve some kind of purpose.
For instance: how many of you know that the entire hullabaloo over foreign language student accommodation – and the tax (not) paid thereon – originated as a devious little PQ by a certain Bartolo, Evarist, in 2006? Or that it was largely thanks to a PQ, accidentally planted by the PN’s future general secretary last week, that we now know exactly how useless our national resistance to divorce has really been? (Note: collateral damage, it seems, is not limited to Iraq).
As a rule, though, awkward questions such as these tend overwhelmingly to come from the party in Opposition, which has a vested interested in making life as difficult as possible for its equivalent across the floor. The party in Government, on the other hand, usually produces questions calculated to spare the minister concerned any serious embarrassment, while at the same time providing useful statistics for the media to collectively mistake for “news”.
So Nationalist MPs such as Jason Azzopardi will ask PQs of earth-shattering consequence, such as: Can the honourable minister say how many times the Upper Barrakka has been used as a wedding reception venue? (I kid you not: he asked this in 2005, and the answer was: “Two, and you weren’t invited to either...”)

But as I was saying, no matter how silly the question, the honourable minister in question has to at least try to answer it. Unless, that is, he happens to be the Prime Minister... in which case, he can simply turn around and say: “None of your business. Now sod off!”
Ok, maybe not in so many words. But that is pretty much how Dr Lawrence Gonzi replied this week to a PQ by Labour MP Silvio Parnis. For the record, his actual words were: “This information would have to be gathered manually from thousands of forms… Since this would take a lot of time and resources, I do not see any reason why this exercise should be conducted.”

In case you were wondering, the requested task – which, by his own admission, is beyond the capabilities of our managerial Prime Minister – involves computing the precise number of voters in the 2008 and 2006 elections who required assistance because of illiteracy.
And yet, it doesn’t sound like a terribly difficult question to answer. There are 13 electoral districts, subdivided into X amount of polling stations, each overseen by official Electoral Commission representatives... as well as dozens of “voluntary agents” (i.e., spies) placed there by the political parties themselves. Each time a voter requests such assistance, the electoral commission has to be informed... as indeed it is. (Incidentally, the issue of assisting illiterate voters has always been loaded with the potential for abuse – for further details, look under “trusted friend” from the 1950s Integration campaign.)
This means that the requested information certainly exists, and is (or should be) readily accessible to the Prime Minister, should he choose to access it. If this involves manual gathering from thousands of forms... well, I’m sorry but that’s hardly an excuse to duck the question altogether.

Imagine for a moment if the private sector started operating on the same principle. Going to the bank would be fun: “So sorry, but we can’t conduct your transaction today. There’s just too much damn paperwork involved...” Or how about a private hospital? “Remember that appendicitis operation you booked yourself in for? Do you have any idea how much hassle that would entail? We’d have to anaesthetise you first, then cut you open, lop off your appendix, stitch you back together again... Sorry, but we just can’t be bothered...”
And on it goes.

Besides, if it’s too much trouble to find out how many illiterate voters voted... imagine for a second how much work goes into finding out exactly how they voted – illiterate or otherwise – hours before the boxes are even opened. Think of all the manual inputting of thousands of personal ID numbers, to be checked against a database of voter preferences... which, thanks to a certain blog somewhere, we now know took place out between 11pm of Saturday 8 March, and 10.30 the following morning.
This kind of information gathering – all illegal, by the way, but nobody, least of all the police, seems to care – also takes a lot of effort and manpower. But if there is an ounce of advantage to be gained for the Nationalist Party, then hey presto! You can rest assured that the same PM who now avoids PQs because they’re “too much work”, will be driving his army of zombie volunteers with a cat o’ nine tails.

So all things told: sorry, Lorenzo, but I’m just not buying it. I have been observing local politicians for long enough to know that when you refuse to answer a question, it’s not because you don’t know the answer, but simply because it’s not in your interest to divulge it.
Which raises the inevitable question: what is it about this particular data that Dr Gonzi would rather keep under wraps? The answer should by now be obvious, but I’m in a tautological mood, so I’ll overlabour the point anyway.

However many illiterate voters requested assistance in the 2008 and 2006 elections, you will find that the number is either equal to, greater than or less than the corresponding statistics for 1998 and 1992. If it is equal, then there is no big deal whatsoever. If it is less, so much the better: it means more people know how to read. If, however, it turns out to be substantially more... well, that would qualify as a major cause for concern for Dr Lawrence Gonzi and his government, for at least two reasons I can think of off-hand.
1) It would mean that people born in 1980 and onwards, and who would have left school in the mid-1990s, received a much lower standard of education than people born in the early 1970s and earlier, some of whom were still at school when Agatha Barbara was Education Minister. Belonging to the second category myself, I can assure you all that’s a pretty damn serious indictment of Malta’s education system after 20 years of a PN administration.
2) Conversely, it would imply that a portion of those who requested such assistance in the 2008 elections did not actually need it, because they were not illiterate at all. In this case, they must have had another reason to want to be accompanied into the polling booth by a party representative. Considering that there have been allegations of vote-buying – with Dr Anglu Farrugia even giving us a hypothetical scenario in which the voter would claim to be illiterate in order to show to a party representative how he voted – I don’t think we’ll need to call in Hercule Poirot to find out why.

How disappointing. Just when we thought it was impossible to take Farrugia’s allegations seriously – after all, the MLP deputy leader has so far failed to supply a jot of proof – the Prime Minister suddenly develops a pathological reluctance to provide what should really be routine electoral data... data which would go some way towards either substantiating or disproving Farrugia’s vote-buying allegations to begin with. And all of a sudden, what was previously implausible begins to look entirely credible.
The good news, though, is that both Lawrence Gonzi and the chairman of the electoral commissioner, Edgar J. Gatt, can set our minds at rest whenever they please, by simply answering Silvio Parnis’ PQ once and for all.
How many illiterate voters requested assistance in the last two elections? Go on, tell us...