It is a mistake to have David Agius, the Nationalist whip in parliament, shadow the Minister for Civil Liberties. Mr Agius knows little to nothing about the subject and has the wrong attitude to begin with.

In those days when he replaced David Thake for the afternoon show on Radio 101, I always switched off after a few minutes because his stuffy style of discourse rubs me the wrong way. Civil liberties is a topic which attracts the attention of people who have a markedly different outlook on life than Mr Agius does, and who may also be a tad more intelligent than he is. So they are more likely to listen to him, cringe, and get a bad impression of the Nationalists and where they hope to be in the next few years.

Making David Agius the Opposition’s frontispiece for this touchy subject is not going to do the Nationalist Party any favours, unless there has been a conscious decision to have the Opposition make the sort of sounds on this subject of which the more atavistic of its supporters would approve. I find this objectionable, not least because it is the Labour Party which is infested with people who have the mentality of those who have only recently crawled out of caves, with the sort of supporters who call openly for their political enemies to be stoned in public squares, who think it is normal and acceptable to use extreme homophobic and misogynistic insults to counter rational political arguments.

And yet it is the Nationalist Party, which over the last four decades has been at the vanguard of the fight for individual liberty and human rights in Malta, which ends up portraying itself, because of a series of poor choices, as an organisation which wants to stop people doing things, stuffed full of shocked spinsters who just happen to be men.

Has the Labour Party had any openly gay electoral candidates? No, not in mainstream elections like those for the national parliament and the European Parliament. And the operative word here is ‘openly’. That doesn’t say much about this government’s real attitude towards gay people. While the Labour Party’s campaign collateral is relentlessly emblazoned with gay couples who, incidentally, are always men and never women, in real life openly gay men – let alone openly gay women – are nowhere to be seen on the party’s extensive candidate list, as a result of which there is not one openly gay Labour MP and there weren’t any in the last parliamentary term either.

I think this is significant. After the general election results were out, the newspapers and political parties concentrated for a little while on discussing the number of women on the government and Opposition benches. That’s an old argument. Given this government’s relentless fanfare about civil unions and same-sex marriages, and the fact that ‘gay marriage’ is the first item on the new parliament’s agenda, what the newspapers should have been asking is: where are the openly gay MPs?

And the answer to this is that there is just the one: Karl Gouder. He is not in Joseph Muscat’s troupe, either. He sits on the Opposition benches. It is Mr Gouder who should shadow the Minister for Civil Liberties, given that civil liberties, in the narrow form in which they are understood by this government, are concentrated mainly in the realm of being either gay or female (though if you are both, Muscat’s government will pretend you don’t exist). Having David Agius, a narrow-minded straight man, shadow civil liberties is like making a man spokesman for women’s rights. The medium is the message.

There’s another point that should be raised in this context. Did the Labour Party have even one transgender candidate on its list in this last election? No, it did not. I stand to be corrected on that, but if it had, then that candidate would have been of the flamboyant and attention-seeking sort which Labour seems to prefer, and she would have been promoted by the party media 24 hours a day. But that did not happen. And this when Muscat’s earlier government made so much fuss about transgender rights. So where were Labour’s transgender candidates? Nowhere.

The Nationalist Party, on the other hand, had the very sober, serious and pragmatic (and young) Alex Mangion on its list. I gave him my number-one vote, and hoped he would make it. He didn’t, but if he stands for election again in five years’ time, he probably will. The fact that the Nationalist Party does not promote its gay and transgender candidates as ‘gay’ and ‘transgender’ is not evidence of its stuffiness (if that were the case, it would be like the Labour Party and have no openly gay or transgender candidates at all). It is evidence of its truly liberal attitude. When you are liberal, you ignore differences and don’t make a special case of those who are gay, transgender or women. And that is why it is a crying shame that David Agius is the Opposition’s spokesman on these matters.