NEWS | Wednesday, 12 November 2008

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Firing on all cylinders

Elections may be four years away, but Joseph Muscat’s maiden speech in Parliament revealed an untried leader itching for a fight.
RAPHAEL VASSALLO on the Opposition leader’s non-budgetary Budget reply

Joseph Muscat had a lot to prove on Monday. As Opposition leader he had yet to set his stamp of authority on a party still reeling from the March 8 humiliation, as well as the subsequent infighting that reduced its leadership election to a shambles.
This much alone was evident in the cacophony of messages that emanated from the “National Manifestation of Courage” at City Gate the day before. From ‘Rastafarians’ fighting for their right to archaic vehicles, to the visible ostracism of secretary-general Jason Micallef, to deputy leader Toni Abela reading a fictitious (and cringe-worthy) “letter from Obama” to the Labour leader, it was more like the national manifestation of an insurmountable identity crisis than anything else.
Reversing such perceptions was never going to be an easy task for the charismatic 34-year-old economist from Burmarrad. But apart from exerting some long-overdue authority on his motley assortment of unlikely political advisors, Monday’s parliamentary sitting also provided Muscat with an opportunity to finally go on the offensive.
And with four years of MEP experience now firmly under his belt, it was clear from the start that Joseph Muscat would be altogether more at home in the House of Representatives than on a soapbox in front of the multitudes. All the same, he was unable at moments to conceal the frustration of a political leader with a workable formula for electoral success in 2013, but without any winning team to see it through.

War for the middle ground
Monday’s Muscat was an altogether more energised version of his forgettable Remembrance Day performance.
The first and most resounding change over previous Labour rhetoric was his constant allusion to the “middle class” – traditionally the domain of the centre-right Nationalist party, but neglected of late by a government seemingly incapable of addressing its own budgetary issues without taxing the long-suffering salaried employee.
And as the UHM, MUT and MUMN ‘cross the floor’ to join the GWU’s demonstration on Friday, the middle class remains the one social sector where the Nationalist establishment can no longer afford any serious haemorrhages.
So with his constant allusion to ‘middle class’ and ‘worker’ almost in the same breath, Muscat succeeded in evoking the image of a poverty gap now threatening to engulf even those who previously considered themselves “immune”.
But inevitably, he opened himself to criticism of precipitating a new sense of class warfare: not least with his singling out of ‘super yacht’ owners as net beneficiaries of Budget 2009; as well as his sardonic reference to IT minister Austin Gatt’s choice of a Jaguar as ministerial vehicle (which, let’s face it, could have been worse – he could have chosen an Austin).

Echoes of Obama
Similarly, much of Muscat’s criticism took its cue from the issues of national preoccupation that Finance Minister Tonio Fenech failed to address at all the week before: namely, the increased water and electricity tariffs.
Like Barack Obama before him, Muscat chose to make all other areas subordinate to the one where he himself felt at his strongest. With Obama it was the global credit crunch; with Muscat, the “self-imposed” crisis the PN government was hell-bent on engineering with its revised utility bills... which according to the Labour leader’s calculations would be equivalent to a surcharge of 194%.
Also like Obama, Muscat enjoyed the luxury of being able to pick and choose any number of failed economic policies from previous Nationalist budgets: enumerating a long list of electoral pledges which failed to ever quite materialise... and reminding his audience at every turn of the need for a “change in direction”, to the background music of 34 simultaneously thumped parliamentary desks.

Pre-emptive strikes
Reacting to constant criticism of a party which “opposes but never proposes”, Muscat broke with tradition by suggesting a series of measures to address the immediate economic impasse.
Of these, the most creative by far was the idea to set alternate rates for daytime and night-time household consumption of electricity: a proposal that would help lower consumer bills, while at the same time instilling a much-needed culture change towards energy usage.
Similarly, he echoed environmentalist discontent by pointing out the sheer amount of waste water – equivalent to 5.4 million mineral water bottles each day – disposed untreated into the sea.
In so doing, Muscat succeeded in addressing two separate but strategically important goals. For the long term, he managed to put himself forward as a semi-plausible alternative for the role of Prime Minister (although his efforts to rehabilitate the Labour Party as an ‘alternative government’ were arguably less successful); in the short term, he also swept much of the carpet from under the feet of Lawrence Gonzi, who must now devote at least part of his address tonight to countering these and other propositions.

Battleground Europe
But Muscat’s tactics were not altogether inscrutable, and apart from attempting to expose the PN as a “two-faced” institution – displaying one countenance before the election, only to replace it with another once safely in power – Joseph Muscat took the opportunity to “set the record straight” on the one area where Labour continues to suffer in the public opinion stakes.
Responding to a media campaign aimed at undermining his own European credentials – focusing mainly on Muscat’s advice for Iceland to stay out of the Eurozone, offered three years ago – he brusquely reminded the Prime Minister (and by extension Net TV) that Eurozone banks in Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg had also collapsed following the market crash.
And detailing the government’s discomfiture on the subject of car registration tax, Muscat took the opportunity to pre-empt the usual criticism of Labour as a party “out of touch” with the European way of doing politics.
“I can assure you, Prime Minister, I know how the EU works,” he thundered above a roar of Labour derision: a clear allusion to the Nationalist government’s embarrassing failure to secure more than a fraction of the €800 million in allocated structural funds.

High and low points
“We cannot be European on paper only,” Muscat at one point blurted out: “We must be European also in our actions.”
The same motif resurfaced at almost every turn, and on the removal of car registration tax – a subject Muscat knows only too well, as he himself had steered the original objection through the European parliament – the Labour leader gleefully noted that the government had not removed this illegal tax on its own initiative, but only after being goaded into action by a previous European Court ruling.
Even then, Muscat argued that the dismantling of the tax regime had been botched; and more significantly, that all those who purchased new cars after May 2004 were owed a refund for any VAT paid on registration tax.
“The government’s behaviour (on this issue) was anything but ‘European’”, he observed, adding that the MLP would campaign for the reimbursement of such defrauded citizens.
It was a coup for Muscat, who somehow managed to electrify a traditionally boring delivery with the promise of a possible windfall for a sizeable proportion of his audience.
But if Muscat’s delivery was on target 90% of the time, there were moments when he proved incapable of keeping Labour’s traditional inferiority complex from shining through.
His constant allusion to “Prime Minister Number 2” to refer to Austin Gatt was one example: nothing wrong with the ploy at face value, but any joke tends to wear a little thin after 17 repetitions.
But the biggest give-away was his haste to pre-empt any counter-arguments during the Prime Minister’s reply tonight. At one point, Muscat rather unfairly took the liberty of putting arguments into Lawrence Gonzi’s mouth, only to deflate them himself with a pre-rehearsed swagger.
It was a dishonest and quite frankly unnecessary tactic... greeted only by a shrug of bewilderment from Gonzi himself, who would evidently prefer to be criticised for his own, rather than other people’s arguments.

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