It should have been obvious at the outset – before, that is, the general election – that Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat are a team. They are a team not just in the political sense, but also in deal-making. The deals they make, they make together. They are operating in tandem. Every significant deal this government has made in the last three years, except the one with Henley & Partners, has featured Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat working closely together.
When Mizzi wasn’t in a position to work on a significant government deal, because it wasn’t in his portfolio, Muscat moved to put him in charge of that portfolio. When Godfrey Farrugia was summarily removed from his position as Minister for Health despite no wrong-doing that warranted it, we wondered why.We all remember his distress as he emerged from Girgenti Palace before the television cameras, having received the news like a bolt out of the blue. And when it was announced that Konrad Mizzi would replace him, despite already being responsible for a heavy portfolio, energy, which has nothing in common with health, we were mystified even further. There were backbenchers who could have been picked for the role. A couple of them were expecting it. But then it was announced that the state hospitals would be privatised, in whole or in part, and that the government would start negotiating for the setting up of a private medical school and campus, and things began to slot into place, in our minds, bit by bit.
When Joseph Muscat said in the general election campaign that he would run the government like a business, he wasn’t joking. And clearly, Konrad Mizzi is his business partner. Their approach to the government of Malta is that of two corporate raiders. Now they are going to take things one step further to ensure that their control of the government and the party are tighter, and that the decisions they make between themselves are even less subject to scrutiny or contestation. Konrad Mizzi is going to be the Labour Party’s new deputy leader of party affairs. This means that between them, those two are going to control both the government and the party. “This will create synergy between the government and the party,” Muscat said, which came across as a little strange. The party and the government should not have synergy between them. Constitutionally, they are separate entities. The government is the government of the country, the government for us all. It should have little to nothing to do with the party in that sense. The last thing we need right now is the return of suspicions that that the government led by Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi is taking certain decisions based on the size of donations to the Labour Party’s war-chest, just as we suspect the party itself did before the general election, arranging its proposed policies to suit.
Muscat said that organisations are usually driven to change when crisis struck, but that it is better to make those changes before the need was felt. This struck me as odd. Changes are made only when the need for them is felt, otherwise the decision to change is irrational and frivolous. It follows, therefore, that Joseph Muscat is now feeling the need to make changes. He is selling it to his party members as the need to change to survive, but on closer examination it will probably turn out to be the need for whatever it is that he and Konrad Mizzi are planning to do next. “After two years in power, we can review the situation and see where we stand,” he told an assembly of the party. But they have not been in power for two years. They have been in power for three.
Muscat acknowledged that the party and the government should be separate. “The party and the government should never be the same thing, but there should be a connection,” he said. Should there? The idea that there should be is responsible for many of the ills that beset the electorate as various parts of it besiege or court the party most likely to form the government, as the day for elections draws near, for favours, privileges and so on. The system is so entrenched, and those who use it so brazen, that a few days ago the publicity-hungry Labour backbencher, Luciano Busuttil, began to talk loudly in various forums about how “we” (the party/government) have to accede to the requests of those who have asked for things and are still waiting.
Given the levels of public disgust right now at corruption, nepotism and cronyism, it would be unwise to take things further in this direction. But it seems likely to get worse as the government – or is it the party? – begins the two-year countdown this month to the next general election. All the snouts not yet in the trough will be jostling even harder to dive right in before it’s too late. And those who snouts are already in the trough, whether publicly or secretly, will be doing all they can to take more.
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