Is it a coincidence that Renzo Piano was asked to redesign Parliament, at the same time as the Opposition complained that Government was ignoring the House’s procedures? RAPHAEL VASSALLO examines the case for a forgotten, European-style democracy
Investment Minister Austin Gatt may have revealed more of his government’s mindset than he intended, when he tasked Renzo Piano with a ‘small alteration’ to his designs for a modern new House of Representatives at the entrance to Valletta.
Whatever one makes of the idea to move Parliament to Freedom Square in the first place – or for that matter, of the accompanying designs for City Gate, or the Theatre which will now lack a roof – one aspect of Piano’s plan was bound to find admirers in the growing segment of people who clamour for lasting political change.
Asked to design ‘a Parliament’, Piano assumed – wrongly, as it turned out – that the word would mean the same in Malta as it does (say) in Belgium, or some other Western country with a long tradition of democracy. So he came up with a design that 90% of Europe would instantly recognise as resembling their own House of Representatives: that is to say, a semi-circular arrangement of seats, positioned in such a way that all MPs would face the Speaker of the House directly without having to crane his or her neck sideways (as is the case with the present Parliament in the Palace).
Malta, however, very clearly belongs to the remaining 10% (with the UK making up the rest of this political minority) which envisages “Parliament’ as comprising two rows of seats facing each other across the aisle of a long corridor. And so – confronted with Piano’s incomprehensible, hemispherical design – Austin Gatt was understandably flummoxed. Did Piano misunderstand the brief, he must have asked himself while pretending to admire the plans? Or has the word ‘Parliament’ suddenly and inexplicably changed meaning while he wasn’t looking?
Whatever Austin Gatt thought to himself, his public pronouncement on the matter was crystal clear. Citing ‘differences’ in political tradition between Malta and the rest of the democratic world – and evidently unaware of the irony in his own request – he asked Piano to redesign that aspect of his Parliament building so that, once again, our MPs will face each other from across a corridor in an eternal symbol of the only type of politics Malta has ever really practised - the politics of confrontation, hatred and mistrust.
In so doing, Gatt unceremoniously quashed what some people considered the most welcome feature of Piano’s entire project. More significantly, though, he also provided spectacularly flawed arguments to justify his request – thus letting slip the real motivations behind the proposal in the first place.
Malta, he claimed, had inherited its Parliamentary model from the United Kingdom. For this reason, we still used expressions such as ‘to cross the floor’ – which would be meaningless in the semi-circular configuration.
But if this is the case, and Malta did indeed model its Constitutional democracy on that of a country without a written Constitution... then where is Malta’s equivalent of the House of Lords – which is as much part of the British system as the Commons our own House has clearly copied? And if our parliament does follows the British system... then why is our electoral system (which decides who gets to occupy those seats in the first place) so much closer in spirit to Ireland – i.e., proportional representation by single transferable vote – than to the UK, with its completely different and unrelated concept of ‘first past the post’?
Placed in conjunction with ongoing complaints – mainly from the Opposition benches “across the floor” – that Parliament in general is abdicating its role as a forum of debate and discussion, the redesign concept speaks volumes about how the ruling government actually perceives the institution through its own unique lens. Forum for debate? Hardly. Parliament, in the view of the party which occupies the government of the day, evidently serves as a venue to symbolize – if necessary even through its design – the recognisable dynamic of sum-total power, whereby one side inevitably crushes the other in a winner-takes-all scenario.
And yet, it wasn’t always like this. Malta may not have had a House of Lords - which, as institutions go, is not without its own critics – but with the acquisition of self-government in 1921, Malta did originally receive a bicameral parliament directly from the British. Earlier versions of today’s Kamra Tad-Deputati - basically, the Kamra ta’ L-Arazzi in the same Palace – was closer in design to Pianos hemisphere than to Gatt’s preferred ‘corridor of confrontation’.
Granted, the original system was not free from flaws. “Democracy” has after all changed meaning somewhat, from the days when seats in parliament were directly proportional to the amount of land owned by the incumbent MP; or when certain institutions and political classes, such as the Church or the aristocracy, were automatically entitled to unelected representation.
But to claim that our system is ‘based on the British model’, when in actual fact it is at best the scrambled result of endless tweaking for the benefit of the parties that occupy its seats - rather than the electorate they are supposed to represent - is not only deeply flawed. It is an excuse to undermine the most positive aspect of the designs submitted by Renzo Piano, who, no doubt coincidentally, gave us all a small lesson in parliamentary democracy... even though it evidently wasn’t in his brief.
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