Prime Minister and Nationalist Party leader Lawrence Gonzi yesterday made a clear declaration that faces at the government’s helm would be changing if re-elected to government on 8 March.
Interviewed by veteran journalist and former Sunday Times editor Laurence Grech, Dr Gonzi was asked about the “systematic campaign” against Cabinet ministers being mounted by the Malta Labour Party.
“There will be a need for fresh blood, in accordance with the results of the general election,” Dr Gonzi told a dialogue meeting in Naxxar yesterday evening.
“Let me be clear,” he added, “no one’s place is guaranteed after the election – not mine, not my colleagues’, not even the PN’s place in government. As such, we need to keep working to the last minute of the last day of the electoral campaign.
“The only ones with a guarantee are the Maltese people, a guarantee of being able to make a completely free choice – a choice that I will bow my head to and fully respect.”
Dr Gonzi had confirmed elsewhere in the electoral campaign that if re-elected he would be relinquishing the finance ministry portfolio so as to take on the reform of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, currently under the remit of the rural affairs and environment ministry.
Mr Grech started off the interview in hard-hitting fashion, with the first question addressing the issue of the day – the MLP’s allegations of a Cabinet memo proposing charges for health services.
The allegation, Dr Gonzi said, was but another in a long string of lies emanating from a “panicked” party, a list that has recently included false allegations that the government intended closing junior lyceums and pushing Matsec resits up to November.
The health services proposal, he said, was presented at cabinet committee level by a group of experts and had never made it to Cabinet level.
“The country,” he reiterated, “will continue to have free health services.”
Although unemployment was at a 12-year low and employment levels at all time highs, Dr Gonzi said the area was one in which one could “never be satisfied and in which one could always aim for more”.
“The most worrying moment in my four years as prime minister,” he acknowledged, “was when I heard 900 people had been laid off from Denim.”