The past week’s television discussion programmes have been superb. Int x’tahseb on Smash hosted Joe Saliba and Jason Micallef, Secretaries General of the PN and the MLP respectively. Stephen Cachia, Secretary General of the Green Party was not invited.
I watched it in awe. All three protagonists including chatshow host Saviour Balzan, managed to debate every facet of Maltese politics, past, present and future without once mentioning the Greens. It was miraculous. It was a virtuoso performance.
These astute commentators on our political life managed to avoid the fact that in the last elections held in Malta, the Greens leaped forward from 0.7 per cent twelve months before to 9.3 per cent. Right through the programme no mention was made of the astounding fact that in the last election 25 per cent of those entitled to vote did not vote for either the PN or the MLP.
In all 77,000 people preferred to vote Green or to stay at home. For our MLP-PN gurus this is not a relevant statistic. They preferred another episode of the eternal catfight between them that has produced this situation.
Joe Saliba referred to the “two parties”. He is recreating the myth that is already part of our political history. His bi-party mindframe is history. He is out of touch with political reality and clutching at media generated virtual reality, Jason Micallef was much better.
At one point he referred to something which concerns us all and blurted out: “Il-partit Laburista, il-partit Nazzjonalista u l-Alt…..” he choked on the last word. He had almost broken the taboo and lost points in the Int X’tahseb competition. It was his only mistake.
Lou Bondi’s Bondiplus does better still. Greens are excluded from debates. The producer has a take-it-or-leave it policy. Greens can either turn up for an interview on the roof of Vincenti Buildings or be absent altogether. The four-minute interview is then miraculously reduced to a clip of just a few seconds with the replies docked to perfection. If we appear in a clip, he can claim to have had all three political parties on his programme. If we refuse, we will have refused to participate.
In the latest version, Charles Mangion and Tonio Fenech slugged it out over economic policy. Yet another episode of the MLP-PN catfight. We had Charles Mangion proclaim that the MLP was an economic godsend in the 1980s and Tonio Fenech defended his economic policy by pointing out that the MLP does not have one.
All 260,000 Maltese voters may have watched in disgust. We all know that our present situation has been produced by decades of squabbling and electoral imperatives from Labour’s 1987 employment bonanza to the five-yearly splurge on social services since. Getting elected or re-elected was the target, not long term economic sanity. Greens can speak for a majority that is spitting mad at the long series of deliberate deceptions and creative public accounting.
We will not be given the chance. Our rivals appear to have too much to lose if any of us get to quell the catfight and make concrete proposals. Mario Mallia did his best on the Valletta rooftop-cum-studio. It was omitted. No Green economic proposal was aired. In Int X’tahseb the virtual reality of the two other parties was underscored. In Bondiplus it was made to seem that The Greens have nothing to say on economics.
Green economic policy papers are available on our party website. They have been submitted to the government and to the social partners and have been made public in the past months. We have participated in the initiative for the formulation of a social pact and continue to urge a rational economic truce. Our suggestions have been taken up by government in a number of instances and our criticism does not prevent us from making positive suggestions whenever we can. Edward Fenech, our party’s spokesperson on Finance and Economic Affairs has a regular column The Malta Independent on Sunday back-to-back with Lou Bondi’s column. Lou Bondi appears to have missed all this.
Super One’s Target chatshow also appears to be slipping. Minister Tonio Borg and Dr Gavin Gulia took on the hot potato of irregular immigration. Miriam Dalli managed to miss the fact that I am the most recent non-government witness of the outrageous conditions in which detainees are held at Safi barracks. It was only after my visit last week that the Minister visited the camp himself and sedated the country by promising unspecified improvements.
Fr Pierre Grech Marguerat from the Jesuit Refugee Service was caught in the political crossfire and was pinned down. He was in the position of all NGOs in Malta: caught between the eternal sparring partners and avoiding the danger of being accused of taking sides. He needed to avoid provoking further racism among viewers and dared not rebuke either of his companions too strongly. It is the reason why I entered politics after my NGO experience. I need to be free. He has to tread a minefield with human lives and destinies in the balance.
The programme became a whitewash to cover national shame. The fact that hundreds of men and women have been standing out in the cold for the past several months went unnoticed. Target went wide of the mark by omitting to notice that the press have been kept out of detention centres. The Maltese know more about the inmates of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen that they do about the mental and physical torture, the inhuman and degrading treatment, inflicted on others in their name today, 20 minutes away from them.
The Greens were completely excluded from the Target debate. Instead we had Tonio Borg persuading the country that all is well, that he has done his best in a bad situation. We had Gavin Gulia scrape up a few racist votes by mentioning that he has seen prisoners being rude to the guards who had prepared their meals. I was not there to tell him that if he had imprisoned me in infernally overcrowded conditions or exposed to all weather for months on end with no idea of what was to become of me, I too would spit in his eye no matter what he fed me.
The catfight abated on Target. The PN – MLP debate was guarded. They are both scared stiff of losing votes. On an issue like this Greens don’t give a damn about votes. We will not participate in any whitewash. We demand that any person of any creed or colour held in custody in our name as Maltese citizens should not be treated worse than an animal. We defend dumb animals with gusto, let alone humans who are treated worse.
We also endorse the policy carefully and calmly explained by Fr Grech Marguerat. Detention is an expensive, cruel and counterproductive policy beyond the necessary minimum duration. If we are incapable of processing refugee applications within a short time, we should release our detainees and allow them to support themselves, to occupy themselves during their wait. Eighteen months of detention is not a reasonable time. It is better than the years it took before but it is still not good enough. We should be able to decide on whether a detainee should stay or leave in a much shorter period.
Only days earlier Joe Grima’s programme JoeGrimaLive repeated the myth that the Greens in general and I in particular had done a U-turn on the Marsascala recycling plant. Joe Grima did a Bondiplus Super. He invited Ralph Cassar to participate and allowed him to be drowned out by George Pullicino. The minister spoke twice as long as anybody else and interrupted everyone. The Greens were there in the flesh but were overpowered. The producer did not appear to notice that Ralph Cassar had no microphone directed at him and could not know that his comments in reply could hardly be heard across Pullicino’s propaganda.
The programme followed Net TV and PBS news items in which I was heard to say that the Sant Antnin project would not happen. The clip that was used over and over again came at the end of a three minute speech in which I contested a system which has gone through the defence of the environment in street fights against Lorry Sant’s thugs in the 1980s, to a planning process in which one had a fighting chance to make an objection, to the proposed fait accompli presented by Pullicino at Marsascala to an incensed audience of residents. I simply made it clear that the upgrading did not stand a chance in hell if it was presented in this way. Net TV and PBS used the last words alone.
George Pullicno had the gall to say that I changed my mind within 48 hours. He repeated it at ad nauseam on JoeGrimaLive. I have not changed my mind. I had simply repeated what I had said in the first place. The Sant Antnin upgrading will not take place if it is pushed down the throats of Marsascala residents. They have to be satisfied first that there is no alternative site, then that it is an improvement on what they have at present and finally, that they will be sharing the burden with other parts of the country. If they are not convinced they will resist and they are in the mood to prevent the whole project. I merely stated a fact that should have been very obvious at Marsascala.
It is the same with the Pullicino carpark project in Qui-si-Sana. It cannot be rammed down the throats of residents simply because George Pullicino is the Minister and he has legal authority to do anything he pleases regardless of resistance. There will be a price to pay for any bulldozer tactics there too. It is patently obvious.
Will Qui-si-Sana feature in some upcoming TV debate? Will it be yet another whitewash? Will residents be lured to believe that their case is being given an airing only to find that they have been set up? Will it be made out to seem that they are a bunch of toffs defending their turf, just as Marsascala residents have been made out to be the stooges of the PNs political rivals? They would be easier to isolate and destroy than Marsascala residents who have suffered the bungling of two administrations for a whole decade. Qui-si-Sana residents are few and expendable in a PN surplus electoral district.
Greens are not worried about the media circus. We have gone from 0.7 per cent to 9.3 per cent without a media empire. There are 54,000 voters who have allowed the scales to fall from their eyes with whom we can form an alliance. We can give them a much better Malta. Our first task will be to make it impossible for the media to present a virtual political reality, We can give a real voice to ordinary citizens whoever they may be, to end the eternal human sacrifice on the altar of electoral expediency. This I can promise in the most solemn manner and it may be enough to change the face of this country.
Dr Vassallo is Chairperson of Alternattiva Demokratika –
The Green Party
www.alternattiva.org.mt