It was perhaps merely a footnote to parliamentary proceedings when the House convened earlier this week to debate the Media and Defamation Bill, but there was one MP who provided something of a voice in that particular wilderness that is the political sphere.

That MP was Claudio Grech, who relayed an incident in which his son asked him why MPs could not do anything to help a friend of his who was suffering from a rare and life-threatening illness.  What good can Members of Parliament do, he asked, if they are unable help a young kid such as his friend?

Children sometimes have a way of leaving us speechless and struggling for what on the surface appears to be an obvious answer but one which, in reality, is very difficult to provide. Most parents have undoubtedly been there before.

Mr Grech said he tried to explain to his son about the work he and his colleagues do in Parliament, matters that are of little concern to children and which hardly provide an answer to the burning question at hand, and he was stumped for an answer.

That incident, he said forced him to ask himself about what MPs give the most importance to in Parliament.  It is sometimes children who shock us into introspection, into searching our souls and asking ourselves some of the most important questions in life.  Such, it appears, was the case with Mr Grech.

With such thoughts still on his mind, Mr Grech presumably went to Parliament on Wednesday evening with a bone or two to pick and when his turn came for his intervention on the Media and Defamation Bill, he went decidedly off-topic and provided anyone who was listening with a refreshing take on what politics should, and should not, be about.

He chastised his fellow MPs for the perpetual mudslinging that permeates the country’s politics and took them to task for stooping to such tit-for-tat levels where the trading of insults has become the order of the day, instead of seriously debating policies that truly make a difference to people’s lives.

Insulting one another from across the House, he said, was easy, but to engage in serious policy debate requires time-consuming study, research and thought.  Parliamentary proceedings, he said, have become more of a reality television show than a forum where diverging political forces engage in healthy debate with the mutual and overarching aim of improving the lives of those who elect them.

Such behaviour, which, incidentally, both sides of the House can be accused of, debases the level of political discourse that people should expect from their politicians.

What Mr Grech did was to raise the prospect of a new level of social and political discourse for the country’s politicians, to provide a ray of hope for a real ongoing discourse about values and ideologies that transcend those political lines that have been etched in stone for so many decades. But the constant mudslinging and tit-for-tat politics, which appear to have become the norm these days, only serve to obfuscate the real issues that the politics are meant to address.

Parliament must seek to genuinely debate the policy issues that at the end of the day have a very real bearing on people such as the friend of Mr Grech’s son.  It must continuously seek not only to raise the level of the country’s political discourse, but to foster genuine debate amongst politicians on every matter of national importance.