Jason Micallef, the MLP secretary general, seems to lack the ability to tell it like it is (MaltaToday Midweek, 24 October 2007). I won’t bother with his opinions about my journalistic work. He knows as much about journalism as I do about the gardening programmes he used to present on PBS. 
Let me stick to the facts he got wrong. He claims that by inviting Charles Mangion, the MLP deputy leader, on Bondiplus, an invitation the latter accepted immediately, I was somehow breaking his party’s procedures. I cannot invite “any Tom, Dick and Harry and expect them to be there”. I did not go through him, chides the MLP secretary general. Wrong. For years, I have been inviting both MLP deputy leaders directly and they have always accepted. Incidentally, I find it rather odd that Jason classifies his own deputy leader in the Tom, Dick and Charlie category.
Secondly, Jason claims that his party has twice “protested” against Bondiplus and in both cases the protests were upheld. He cites the original budget programme on 8 October which was presented by the PBS newsroom as his first piece of evidence. Wrong again. The PBS newsroom had always presented the immediate dopo-budget programme and PBS decided not to break with tradition. It was a PBS programming decision which had absolutely nothing to do with Bondiplus’ journalistic credentials. The BA was not involved in the decision at all.
Jason’s second piece of evidence of my alleged unfairness and partiality is even more bizarre. He cites the Broadcasting Authority’s decision to stop Bondiplus last week as proof of his accusations against me. Let me get this straight. Jason gets the BA to genuflect in front of him and abort Bondiplus - one of the deepest stabs against democratic Malta in decades - and that for him this amounts to proof that Bondiplus is unfair and partial. If the MLP loses the election, Jason ought to be drafted to teach logic at our University.
Allow me a final personal note. Bondiplus’ slot on PBS is just a bit over an hour. Once a week. That’s it. At his disposal, Jason has a TV station, a radio station and a website 24/7, a weekly newspaper, the support of all the GWU newspapers, parliament and a vast party machine. And yet he mounts a hysterical crusade to get a teeny-weeny one-hour weekly programme off the air. With a grin, I rest my case.

Lou Bondi
Director, Where’s Everybody

With regards to the article concerning children’s allowance, I would like to rephrase the following sentence:
“Now, a working class family with two children earning Lm5,000 will be eligible for an annual allowance of Lm632 while a similar family earning Lm7,000 will earn Lm392. A two-child family earning Lm10,000 will now earn Lm214.”
It should read:
After paying taxes to the tune of tens of thousands of lira for the last 10 years, “A two-child family earning more than Lm10,000 will next year be promised Lm214”, while a working class family with two children earning Lm5,000 will be eligible for “an annual allowance of Lm632, to the Lm6,320 from the last ten years”!
It is obvious that I am one who has always paid my taxes, and cannot find a single line in the budget where the present administration is doing anything to reduce the people who evade paying taxes, and over and above this, get social security benefits and children’s allowance.
Please remember that the Lm214 has to be spent and 18% of it will be VAT on spending it, apart from the profit margins and additional expenses added onto any service or product due to the rising cost of living index.

Thanks for nothing!

Carmelo Galea
Gudja 

All who followed the last edition of Xarabank might have noticed how hysterical parliamentary secretary Tonio Fenech was. I used to have the opinion that Mr Fenech can represent a new, different and fresher generation of politicians. But I was proved wrong.
I expected a detailed and technical analysis of the budget from a parliamentary secretary in the ministry of finance. But instead his comments were full of partisan elements. This was more obvious especially when he was under pressure. At the same time Fenech said nothing about how this budget will improve Malta’s competitiveness or how his government decided in favour of certain things and not others.
On the other hand MLP deputy leader Charles Mangion was much more objective. He accepted the fact that this budget included good social measures and emphasised how his government will also build on those. But Mangion was also interested on talking about competitiveness, cost of living and Labour’s concrete proposals for a new beginning.
There was a stark contrast between the partisan style of Fenech and Mangion’s delivery that after all emphasised things that are crucial for citizens in order to achieve a better quality of life.

Charmaine Calleja
St Pauls Bay

It was erroneously reported, in the article ‘Malta’s Parmalat – how Priceclub went belly up, and the hunt for the money’ in MaltaToday Midweek of 24 October, 2007 that Frans Gauci was the father of Christopher Gauci. This is incorrect – Frans Gauci was the previous owner of the supermarket chain later purchased and operated by Christopher Gauci, Wallace Fino and Victor Zammit. The period treated in the article, concerning the maladministration of the Priceclub chain, was not related to the previous ownership.