Evarist Bartolo | Sunday, 22 February 2009

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Gonzi’s hidden agenda

Both in private and in public, Dr Lawrence Gonzi has expressed himself in favour of introducing a system of public funds for political parties. This would weaken the stranglehold that private financiers have on parties and politicians in Malta and Gozo. It would be a major step forward to strengthen democracy in our islands and increase the say of taxpaying citizens in the public affairs of our country.
Dr Gonzi agreed with Labour leader Dr Joseph Muscat to set up a select committee composed of government and opposition MPs to reach bi-partisan agreement on a number of crucial issues that would help us have a more advanced and mature democratic system.
But now Dr Gonzi is ready to wreck the difficult work of the select committee, spread total mistrust between the two major parties and throw away all the nice promises about being committed to a new way of doing politics. His public declaration last Sunday that the financing of political parties is not one of his priorities, coming within the context of the way the PN leaked manipulated confidential select committee information to The Sunday Times, and then the way the PBS main news bulletin was used obscenely to try and damage the Labour Party, shows Gonzi’s real agenda.
He is trying to get himself out of the tight corner he is in within his party with a number of disgruntled backbenchers and former ministers ready to stand up to him as they feel badly let down by him. Out of these cracks comes oozing out information discussed only within the Nationalist Party parliamentary group, and the Cabinet of ministers.
So Gonzi has decided to lash out at the Labour Party, to try and cover up the division within his party. He has to try and create a diversion from the humiliating way he had to back down on the crazy project of digging up an underground museum near the Co-Cathedral of St John.
In parliament he has presented a motion to weaken our parliament. It does not need much. Once passed, the procedural motion will render Parliament more impotent and ineffective in its essential role of holding government to account. The envisaged Lisbon Treaty strengthens the role of national Parliaments across all EU countries, but Dr Gonzi’s government wants to use Parliament as a rubber stamp.
The government has ignored Parliament altogether on how the EU budget for Malta between 2007 and 2013 should be spent. Other countries had involved their parliaments on the setting of priorities for spending such funds.
For all its talk about European values and its commitment to bring the EU closer to the people, the Gonzi government shows no interest to invigorate our parliament as one of the indispensable institutions of a healthy democracy.
Over the last months, to project himself as a unifier, Gonzi has offered the largely symbolic offices of President and Speaker to people from the Labour camp, while he leads his party to occupy all the offices where real power is exercised every day, largely to the detriment of the majority of voters who chose not to vote for the Nationalist Party last March.
When parliament opened last May, Dr Gonzi’s government was all talk of “how we must do away with resentment and division, and work together to achieve the common end of the common good.”
All that talk has evaporated now, as Dr Gonzi has undermined the Select Committee which was a tool for finding a new way forward on how to work together for the common good. We need a new political culture and a new robust role for parliament to help us face the challenges ahead. The result of the last election should have made the Nationalist Party leadership less arrogant and more ready to reach out and govern by national consensus.
The government should have accepted the hand of friendship extended by the new Labour leader to collaborate on national issues such as ST Microelectronics, the shipyards and the effects of global recession on the Maltese economy. But despite all his talk of the need to work together Dr Gonzi is not interested in this as he wants to continue demonising the Labour Party as being negative.
As a Labour Party we are ready to work for the good of the country but we are not ready to become the supporters’ club of the PN. The PN has no sacrosanct right to a pairing agreement in parliament. The Labour opposition is doing nothing more than what the Nationalists did in opposition between 1996 and 1998. Ominously, there are strong indications that a concerted plan is under way by the PN to use the tools of government to try and break the back of the Labour Party and its media so that it can govern the way it wants. It is our mission to resist and counter Gonzi’s real agenda and restore real democratic politics to this country.

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