The recent turbulent sittings in the House of Representatives have shocked many. Irrespective of who was right and who was wrong, the uncouth conduct of many Opposition members has led to a negative judgement about them in the public perception stakes.
Many are interpreting the events that developed as a return to the habits of yesteryear, with the old guard taking over and carrying Joseph Muscat with them, rather than him leading them in the fracas. Old habits die hard, and the incident sparked off by a genuine mistake during the voting process must have evoked memories of past conflicts, encouraging the old guard to push Muscat in drawing new battle lines.
The old guard believes that when in Opposition, the Labour Party should wage war incessantly and persecute the government with no holds barred, be it in Parliament or elsewhere. They do not believe in engaging civilly with one’s political adversaries. They consider this as being a sign of weakness. This is, after all, Dom Mintoff’s macho heritage that Labour apparently cannot shake off.
The nostalgia for what they consider as having been ‘the good old days’ drives them to thinking in this manner and they have not given Muscat any space to launch the new political season that he once promised. Muscat’s earthquake was indeed a mild one – more so compared to the aftershocks that the old guard have been causing.
The recent quarrels in Parliament and the behaviour of the majority of Labour MPs have served to strengthen the perception that Muscat is not really in control of the Labour Parliamentary group. His inexperience in Parliament might have possibly made things worse, but the public can only wonder whether Muscat would actually be in complete control of his party if it is in power, considering the extent to which his control has been found lacking in Opposition.
The ‘old guard’ litany inspired by the obsolete ‘socialist’ class struggle surfaced again in Parliament during the discussion on the privatisation of the dockyard. Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi put it succinctly when he said that Parliament was living a surreal experience where the Opposition MPs spoke as if they were living in another world! A world – I would add – that no longer exists, albeit the Labour old guard who do not realise this fact of life.
The mentality of the old guard was glibly reflected in a letter published last week in this newspaper sent by a correspondent purporting to comment on my article the previous week. Amongst other things, this correspondent insisted that the Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici (KMB) administration left a ‘favourable balance in the public coffers’. This is completely untrue. Incidentally the writer of the letter gave the game away when she lamented that the Labour party is a ‘weak’ opposition. We all know how the old guard defines the words ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ in this context!
At the risk of repeating myself and annoying Labour’s old guard, I reiterate that history shows that as soon as the income from the renting of the military base ended in 1979, successive Labour governments at first struggled to avoid budget deficits and then gave up completely. This was done despite the crumbling infrastructure that was abandoned by Labour in government through lack of investment in energy and water production, in telecommunications, in the road network and in other sectors.
By the time the Mifsud Bonnici administration was replaced by the first Eddie Fenech government in May 1987, there was definitely a deficit in the consolidated fund, not a surplus. And KMB’s pre-electoral antics – employing some 8,000 in the public sector and embarking on numerous ‘special projects’ – made sure that no surplus could ever be reached.
The myth of the favourable balance that KMB – who is so loved by the old guard – is supposed to have left in the public coffers is not sustained by the facts. The country’s financial situation when the PN government took over in May 1987 was amply explained by the late George Bonello Dupuis in his first budget speech as Finance Minister, precisely on 25 November, 1987.
He explained that in 1981 there was a positive balance of Lm31.9 million in the consolidated fund, but this had become a negative balance of Lm24.2 million by the end of 1987. The real deficit was even bigger, as these figures hid the fact that the KMB government was drawing funds from the Posterity Fund and the real deficit would have otherwise been Lm89.4 million.
Apart from that, many of the state-owned companies – over a hundred of them such as Kalaxlokk and Malta Drydocks – were in the red, and these losses were set to raise the deficit even further.
The myth owns its origin to the level of Malta’s external reserves about which Labour propagandists used to blow their trumpet so much. In fact these reserves have kept consistently increasing substantially, albeit that they have nothing to do with the ever-increasing government deficit.
On a personal note The correspondent who repeated the myth that the KMB government left a favourable balance in Malta’s coffers also decided to bring out one or two red herrings – spiced with untruths – by launching a ludicrous personal attack on my performance as Chairman of the Water Services Corporation. This is, of course, a typical ‘old guard’ approach: instead of replying to the message, they go off at a tangent by resorting to attacking the messenger!
I do not know who this correspondent is; and for all I know she might be an angel in disguise. What I know is that she seems to accept rumours as fact while repeating them under her signature without bothering to check up on them.
If she did so, she would have found that during my tenure of the WSC chairmanship (1999-2008) the number of employees with the Corporation was steadily and consistently on the decrease, without anyone losing his or her job as a result of any employees being laid off. She would also have found out that during the same period the government subvention to the Corporation – the amount of money forked out by government so that the Corporation could balance its books – also decreased steadily and consistently without any increases in bank loans or in tariffs. This was the road away from bankruptcy, contrary to what the correspondent tried to depict.
As to the story of ‘thousands of euros of public money (that) were wasted in trying to save a billing software from France’, I am afraid that this never happened during my tenure as WSC Chairman. I never heard of this story before and, in fact, I seriously doubt whether this episode ever happened at all.
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