Reading the front page news in the Gens on Saturday 17 March, and after having sat through a whole session of Xarabank the previous Friday on “Malteseness”, got me thinking about the various elements that make up this “Malteseness” of ours. How some of them are being read very well by the whole purple spectrum of our political administration and Opposition (such as for example our love for one of our two languages, Maltese and for our Catholic faith), while others, like our love for our children and a real education, or our love for our environment, are being left by the wayside, with all the non voting consequences that represent the despair of a class of Maltese who feel that their priorities, their articles of faith are being ignored.
The headline in the Gens for those who missed it, was about the government paying or exempting people from paying the departure tax if they go to Rome on 3 June to attend the canonisation of Dun Gorg Preca. Now I can understand why many Maltese think it is wonderful to have a Maltese saint, just as many Maltese are manic about the chance of us winning the Eurovision, and the reports I have heard and read of Dun Gorg certainly indicate he was a lovely human being. But to exempt people from paying the airport tax, or for the government itself to pay it is a little bit weird, to say the least.
Do such exemptions exist for people who are travelling on business to help Malta’s economic growth in no small measure? Do such tax exemptions exist if you travel abroad to visit sick relatives? Are parents with sick children who travel overseas exempt from our dreadful airport tax? Are Maltese students studying abroad and so saving the taxpayer a fortune given any subsidy or refund on this most unfair of taxes? Nobody is as far as I know, and this extraordinary measure simply reflects the importance our politicians give to one spectrum of society, those who are deeply religious and manic about their Malteseness. Put together, it represents about 5000 people who, according to the Gens, are planning to fly to Rome in June for this admittedly historic canonisation. But what about the other 400,000 plus?
Certainly the staunchly Catholic lobby is Malta’s largest. It may not be the outright majority as it was not so long ago, but it still represents an enormous chunk of us, at least a third of our population who are blindly acquiescent to the diktat of the Church. So political parties do have to be careful, and the fact that one party said nothing about divorce while another said it will not introduce it speaks volumes about how anyone wanting political power in Malta has to pander to this lobby, in the same way we are afraid of the hunters, in the same way we are afraid of the building lobby, in the same way so many things are shoved under the carpet here for fear of upsetting the status quo.
It is to our shame that this is a country where a judge who takes a Lm10,000 bribe to reduce a sentence for a drug trafficker is given two years in prison, while a 22-year-old woman, with undoubtedly no powerful family and friends, is jailed for one year for having heroin in her possession when she was only a 16-year-old child. She was with a 25-year-old at the time. She had 20 grams of heroin in her possession and we are sending her to jail for a year. The man she was with was let off because, according to a quote in The Malta Independent, although he “received a number of calls on his mobile from people who wanted to purchase drugs, this was not enough to find him guilty of the charges brought against him.” So we imprison someone who was a child at the time the crime was committed?
Similar inanities were evident on the Xarabank programme discussing what makes us Maltese. All the men on the panel declared they would rather be governed by a Maltese Saddam than by a benevolent foreigner! All the women on the panel disagreed and quite sensibly and rightly in my view thought the benevolent foreigner was a better prospect. One young thug in the audience even accused the women of having a servile colonialist attitude. Far better than the stupidity which wants a Maltese Saddam, because as one happily said, “ We can always change him.” Considering our democracy is so new and so fledgling, considering how much we know or should know how people are not free and live under such monsters of their own nationality all over the world, this over the top stupid nationalism on Xarabank really represented the lowest common denominator thinking in which our institutions, both political and religious, thrive.
And what happens to those 100,000 who didn’t vote in the last local elections? Those who might not be staunchly religious? Those who might be keen environmentalists? Those who might have liberal views on divorce, and other issues? They are being ignored. So they are ignoring our political classes. Many will come back by the time a general election approaches. The trouble for those who only pander to the largest lobby groups is this. Nobody can really be sure how many of them will.
And this stubborn refusal to consider basically separating the State from the Church, separate planning permits from environmental protection, separate Church law from the rule of the State, will bring about a sea change in our political landscape. Malteseitis is not just religious and Maltese speaking anymore. It is a lot more complex than that, although our political classes appear not to be noticing.
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