A little incident happened last Wednesday in Parliament during question time.
My colleague, Marthese Portelli, posed a supplementary question. Joseph Muscat, the most feminist prime minister in history, remarked something to the effect that, if she can’t understand his answer, she does not deserve to be in Parliament. Then, the tourism minister, Edward Zammit Lewis, vying for the witty feminist spot, said something about “Eva Peron”.
Marthese Portelli shot back: “Well, at least I don’t try to dress like her!” And you could tell from their faces that they felt skewered. Everyone knows who the real Eva Peron (not) in the room is.
If this was just a one-off incident, it would be merely entertaining. But the truth is that these kinds of incidents are multiplying. Labour is getting flustered by the popular reaction to its own scandals and incompetence. The Opposition is getting under Labour’s skin. It is reacting by lunging back wildly.
For example, that same Wednesday evening I debated health on TVM with Parliamentary Secretary Chris Fearne. I gave a list of 45 out-of-stock medicines in the first two weeks of February. He got all hot under the collar and reacted by insisting that he is not corrupt and that using direct orders to buy medicines is not corrupt.
How very interesting. I hadn’t used the word corruption and I agree that direct orders, in themselves, are not necessarily corrupt. However, Mr Fearne clearly felt the need to put some distance between himself and the general impression of corruption and collusion given by the government he is part of. You could not have a better confirmation of how even government members have this impression.
Mr Fearne also insisted on reminding me that I am not a medical doctor while he has 29 years of experience as one. That’s a revealing comment on what he must really think of his direct boss, the actual health minister, Konrad Mizzi, who is no medical doctor either!
When a parliamentary secretary forgets, or does not care about, the implications of his comments for what they say about his boss, you know a government is in panic mode.
Labour keeps giving proof that the Opposition is getting under its skin and that our PQs, now televised, are hitting their mark. Recently we have seen a new strategy from the government side.
Labour backbenchers are topping the bill of question time simply because they must have submitted hundreds of PQs, which automatically (given the rules) puts their questions at the top of the list to be answered. The intention is to squeeze out the Opposition questions.
Of course the government side’s questions asked are intended to glorify the Labour government while digging into anything related to the PN’s period in government. But, because the questions are being asked in a state of panic, they’re ending up doing more harm than good to Labour.
Some of the Labour backbench PQs are proving to be embarrassing for the Prime Minister and his team. For example, in an attempt to try and prove that the previous government was as bad, if not worse, than the current government, we had a PQ about a direct order which, it was implied, should have benefitted former Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s son.
The outcome boomeranged. The reply was meant to shock, and it did, but not in the way that Labour intended.
It looks like there wasn’t one but, oh horror, two direct orders. Shocking indeed!
Then came the most important part of the reply to the question. One direct order was for €59 and the other was for €236. (It also turned out that Dr Gonzi’s son was not actually a shareholder of the company in question.)
Muscat and his team are losing their cool. Let’s face it, they have lost control of the national political agenda, which is totally dominated by the issues set by the Opposition. So to fight the public’s conviction that there is rampant collusion and corruption, Muscat is hoping to find dirty laundry in the PN closet.
He found less than €300 of direct orders and held it up as an example of PN collusion and corruption. He must take us all for fools.