Author: Jacques René Zammit

“Quand j’entends, par exemple, madame Taubira dire qu’elle n’est pas au courant (du fond du dossier), elle nous prend pour des blaireaux. – Gilbert Collard.

One hot issue in French politics right now is that of Sarkozy’s tapped phone. It turns out that Sarkozy was being tapped while conversing with his lawyers and a huge fuss has been made about this – literally left, right and centre. Collard is a Front National representative and he was talking about France’s Justice Minister Mme Taubira who had claimed not to have known about the goings on. According to Collard, it is all a question of accountability and responsibility – Taubira’s portfolio means that police and fonctionnaires with the police and magistrates fall under her jurisdiction. “If she says that she was not aware”, Collard says, “then she is treating us like imbeciles”. Yep. “Blaireaux” means “badgers” but in street language it means idiots.

There’s much of that going around nowadays – politicians treating citizens as though they were idiots. Nothing new under the sun, only that it is becoming much more an “in your face” kind of treatment.

Last Sunday, one of Malta’s main newspapers carried a strongly worded editorial criticising Labour’s one year in government. Anyone who managed to read it would have been pleasantly surprised by the reality check being proposed on a number of fronts by the Sunday Times. A particular paragraph dealing with the impeachment proceedings against Judge Farrugia Sacco did not go down well with the person currently sitting in the institutional seat of Speaker of the House. For the benefit of the members of the public who like me prefer not to pay for the fare on offer on the online papers here is the offensive paragraph in question:

“Once that commission (note: “for the Administration of Justice”) reached a conclusion that was obviously inconvenient for the government, Dr Muscat and the Labour-appointed speaker went out of their way to ensure he (note: Judge Farrugia Sacco) would not be impeached before he reaches retirement age in the summer”. (STOM Editorial – 9 March 2014)

It so happens  that the person currently occupying the post of speaker did not take too kindly to the editorial. Free as he was to disagree with its conclusions – and point out his disagreement publicly if he so liked – he decided to take it one step further. Labour-appointed speaker Anglu Farrugia has demanded that the Sunday Times withdraw what he described as “serious allegations against him ‘as a person and as a Speaker'” and threatened to take legal action should the Times not give the withdrawal equal prominence as its allegation.

Reality check: this is the two thousand and fourteenth year of the christian era. 2014. For the second time during the Labour-led legislature, a labour-appointed public official has decided to use the parliament and its structures as a means to silence criticism. Joseph Muscat had earlier taken exception to a statement by opposition leader Simon Busuttil and transformed the parliament into a mini-jury in order to get the man to shut up (only to scuttle off to watch a football match rather than be present for the proceedings that ensued).

Heaven forbid, of course, that we insinuate in any way that members of parliament and its speaker are not within their rights and prerogatives whenever they try to defend themselves and their reputation. Having said that the zero-sum game that Farrugia is engaging with the Times is not a defence of a prerogative. It would not take too much of a genius for even the leak-recipient that is the Times to notice that the chain of events leading to the postponement of the possible impeachment smacks highly in the very least of incompetence for want of trying. It would be the duty of a vehicle of the press that notices such a lacuna in the mechanisms of our institutional representative structures and processes to point such a lacuna out. It’s a fair comment – accuse it of bias if you like (bias? the Times?) but do not gag it.

Using the “position of Speaker” in order to throw unnecessary weight around is an unfair attempt at gagging the fourth estate. Such cases have been dealt with long ago in real liberal democracies. The freedom of the press and its right to point out deficiencies in democratic representation has long been encapsulated and spelled out in the jurisprudence of the aforementioned liberal democracies. We even had our own moment of glory before the European Court of Human Rights with the famous  Demicoli vs Malta – where the Court found that the requirements of impartiality must always be preserved whenever the House felt its privilege was violated.

Incidentally, one of the two members of parliament to raise the original breach of privilege back in the eighties was the Joe Debono Grech. Another of the old-timer appointments to token but remunerated positions by this meritocratic government (we also learnt recently, among others, of Alex Sciberras Trigona’s and Joe Grima’s appointment as envoys to World Trade and Tourism Organisations). The revamped (Daily Mail inspired) MaltaToday reported yesterday that “Debono Grech refused to stay for a public consultation meeting for the Gozo minister when he learned that he was not to be placed at the head table.” Not much of a twist on the learning curve there either.

And finally, for something completely different and pythonesque, since we are on the subject of institutional disfigurement we might as well mention the news that Minister Manuel Mallia’s minions are organising government official activities in the very impartial venues of PL Clubs. Yes, that’s Kazini tal-Labour. Here’s how the Times reported the matter (my bold):

Government officials employed with the Home Affairs Ministry’s customer care unit have been detailed to attend meetings with the public organised at PL clubs located in the minister’s constituency. According to newspaper adverts titled ‘Always close to you’ (Viċin Tiegħek Dejjem), Manuel Mallia will be holding a series of meetings with the public in the coming weeks in seven localities in the districts from which he was elected last year. Without giving details of the actual place where Dr Mallia will be meeting the public, the adverts state that two days before each meeting, “people from the ministry’s customer care will be present at the respective locality’s Labour Party Club to meet the public”. (Times Online – 11th March)

What will the excuse be this time? That we are saving public money by using venues kindly provided by the Labour Party? That the Minister did not know and was not aware?

Blaireaux anyone?

“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” – Thomas Jefferson