The Bill amending the Local Councils Act was this evening branded as anti-democratic and anti-liberal by Opposition Leader Simon Busuttil, who insisted that the PN will vote against the “shameful” proposals supported by the government.

Speaking in Parliament, Dr Busuttil said the 2017 elections will be cancelled as a result of these amendments. The Labour government, he said, is insensitive to the basic principles that unite our society, including the principle of democracy. “Justice Minister Owen Bonnici, who is piloting the law, will go down in history as the minster that cancelled an election and weakened democracy.”

The Opposition, Dr Busuttil said, is strongly against this law and will vote against it because it can never agree with a law that takes the country a step back instead of forward. The government’s philosophy was not decentralization but rather the centralization of power. It also lacks an electoral mandate for such changes. The PL’s mask has come undone, he said, and it is now clear that Labour does not believe in local councils, councillors and local services. It has reduced their power, their budgets and now it has targeted their elections.

Labour’s plan is clear: it wants to reduce the Local Councils budget, introduce arbitrary ways of dispensing funds and spread the idea that local council elections are a waste of time, and so are local councils.

Replying to a point of order raised by Parliamentary Secretary Stefan Buontempo, Dr Busuttil insisted that the recent capital funds scheme was run in an unfair way. “The discretion on what projects local councils should develop should be theirs, not yours. The government dispensed the money in an arbitrary manner, as it pleased.”

Resuming with his speech, Dr Busuttil said this law showed that the government did not want local councils. It had wanted to cancel last April’s elections but the electorate showed that it disagreed by means of a high turnout. The PM’s reasons to cancel the April elections were populist and banal. The Prime Minister had said at first that the government did not have the money for these elections. Worse still, he said they were a waste of money. In a democracy this is a dangerous argument to make. His second reason was electoral fatigue. Voter turnout in 2012, when only local council elections were held, was 60%, which is as high as the turnout in UK general elections. With Muscat’s arguments, the UK should do away with general elections. Turnout in last April’s election was 68%.

Dr Muscat’s arguments were more fallacious because the government showed that it could manage to find the money for some people. “Why did Joseph Muscat want to cancel the 11 April elections? He wanted to do that because he wanted more power for himself. We argued in favour of democracy for months on end. One cannot believe in democracy only when it suited him. We believe in it always.”

The same arguments are valid for the 2017 elections, which the government does not want to hold. These include the fact that changes to the electoral law were always introduced by agreement from both sides. This government, however, believes that it could do as it pleased, as if it was not elected by the people. Another reason was the fact that this law was taking away an already existing right to vote in scheduled elections. In localities where elections were held in 2013, voters elected a local council for four years. With these changes that mandate will be extended.

These amendments are also taking away the right for youths to vote because those who will be 16 and 17 in 2017 will see the elections cancelled. People were also against these changes. Only 40 persons had taken part in a consultation exercise and, of these, only 11 agreed with the government proposals. The government also wants to extend local council mandates to five years, instead of four, in order to coincide with European Parliament elections. “Not even Barack Obama is elected for a five-year term,” he said.  Apart from the fact that four-year terms for local councils are enough, holding the elections at the same time as EP elections would mean that local council issues would be overshadowed and go largely unnoticed.

The PN’s vision for local democracy is completely different to Labour’s. “We believe in reducing the powers enjoyed by politicians and giving them to the people. We also believe in giving due importance to all elections and voting processes, instead of removing them.”

Dr Busuttil said the PN also wanted more autonomous local councils, entities that did not have to beg for money and be totally dependent on the government. It also wanted to increase their budgets, contrary to what the government was doing.

There were several innovative ways of doing this, including forwarding them a portion of the fees paid on vehicle licences. “Our vision of local councils does not only revolve around roads and pavements but also around living communities where everyone feels included. We want local councils to be important actors in the care of the environment, with an effective role and without having the government steamroll over them. We want Transport Malta and MEPA to listen to them more often and to see more effective cooperation between councils.” The Opposition Leader said the PN also wanted to see local councils benefit more from the €2,500 million in EU funds allocated for Malta.

“All of these should have been included in this law, but the government wants to reduce their powers and reduce them to beggars. This law shows that the government does not believe in democracy, in the decentralisation of power. It wants to do away with council elections to weaken citizen powers and increase its own.”

Dr Busuttil said it seemed that, despite the opposition, the government would push on with these changes. “In doing so, it would not be steamrolling over the Opposition but over the electorate because it is taking away from them the sacrosanct right of the vote”.

Parliamentary Secretary Jose Herrera, who was, until a few months ago, responsible for local councils, said the move to pair local council elections with those of the EP was a practical one. The government also believed in wider suffrage and in fact gave 16-year-olds the right to vote. It had showed its agreement on the subject even when he attended a workshop organised by the PN’s youth section. There were areas where there was room for improvement but the Opposition Leader's criticism was unfair, Dr Herrera said. 

Parliamentary Secretary Roderick Galdes said he expected the Opposition Leader to come up with his vision for local councils but instead had presented the same old arguments. There were several instances, he said, where past PN governments had used money that should have been given to local councils for other projects. The present administration has strengthened local councils because it believes in their role.

PN Secretary General Chris Said said the PN strengthened councils consistently after introducing the concept in 1993. On the other hand, the Labour Party wants to do away with them with the excuse that they are a waste of money. 34 localities are due for council elections in 2017 but the Prime Minister wants to cancel the process. People voted for a four-year term but they will have to put up with a longer term as a result of the government plans to cancel the elections. The government is playing a dangerous game with democracy, he said. “If the Prime Minister wanted to save money he could have avoided the Café Premier fiasco and not wasted €4.2 million.” Dr Said also described the consultation exercise held by the government as a fake one, noting that only 40 people had taken part and that most were against the proposed changes.