Edward Scicluna Sits in another parliament and cannot speak for the Opposition

Malta Independent Sunday, 18 September 2011, 00:00 Last update: about 14 years ago

The other day I wondered out loud why it is always the Leader of the Opposition who criticises the government in matters of the economy and finance. Is he going to be our finance minister as well as our prime minister in 18 months’ time?

Clearly not, for that would be far too taxing for the chap who can’t even be fagged to drag himself to official ceremonies if they happen on a Sunday, and who used the excuse of a crack in his shinbone to disappear from view completely last summer, though it didn’t prevent him taking a cruise with This One, his wife.

I thought about this for about five seconds, and realised that there is no clear designate for the post of finance minister when the Party of Joseph is elected to government. I shuffled through the list of spokesmen and shadows, and understood that there are at least three members of the sort-of-shadow-cabinet who are delegated to speak about these things – Leo Brincat, Karmenu Vella and Charles Mangion.

Leo Brincat is pretty much invisible outside his newspaper columns that nobody reads (damn shame, that), while you never get a peep out of the other two. Presumably, Mangion is far too busy in his notary’s office, working on land deal contracts, which he can criticise later while wearing his Opposition MP hat, while Vella is finding the business of writing a five-year policy programme for the New Golden Years more than a little bit taxing. The strain of keeping those innovative policies top-secret while compiling photo albums about Dom Mintoff on Facebook must be exhausting him.

So in the post-Moody’s debate, it has been largely Joseph Muscat who has been yapping away, while sensible people yawn, remind themselves that he was the one who fought against membership of the eurozone (and the European Union) and look away. If we want advice on how to take sound foreign and economic policy decisions, we’re not going to be looking to Muscat for any of that. We know the buck stops with him, but we’d still like to know what the man who will be his finance minister has to say about all of this.

At least, I assume from the dregs on display that it is going to be a man, but Muscat might have other ideas and be planning on making the earth move for us with the progressive and liberal choice of the Queen of Two Toyshops as finance boss. If he had any black, Muslim one-legged lesbian shopkeepers to hand it would have been so convenient, because imagine all those progressive and liberal birds he could kill with that one stone and damn the consequences for the economy.

The fact that the Opposition party has nobody fit to speak about the economy and finance was highlighted yesterday when a Labour MEP – who is not part of the Opposition because he sits in another Parliament altogether (a distinction which many people miss, largely because they confuse party and Opposition/government) – took time out from his concerns in Brussels to speak as though he is the shadow minister of finance in Malta.

Edward Scicluna, who – I repeat – does not sit in the Maltese Parliament and does not form part of the Opposition – released a statement yesterday criticising the government’s response to Moody’s downgrading of Malta. Imagine what he would have said if that response had been like Obama’s when the United States was downgraded by Standard & Poor for the first time in its history: no matter what the ratings agencies say, we will always be a triple A nation.

I’m not going to delve into the merits of what Scicluna said and how the government, in response, buried him under an avalanche of facts and figures – though I do have a great deal to say, which I shall keep to myself, about the artfully misleading headline to the online report in The Times, “Moody’s report refutes government spin on Malta’s economy − Edward Scicluna”.

What interests me is why the Opposition has resorted to an external consultant from another Parliament to speak on its behalf – something which an external consultant by definition cannot do, as he does not represent the Opposition – when it has so many MPs decorating the decks of our own Parliament. Are they all utterly incompetent in matters of the economy? If so, then Muscat had better get to work fast, and it’s not only he who should be worried.