The Labour Party is just unreal. It talks about profligacy in public spending, but then bends over backwards to encourage the mentality of something for nothing, of ‘stenna l-bajtra taqa’ f’ħalqek’, of ‘iss ħej, mhux fier’, and of making no effort at all to improve your own lot. This is the opposite of liberal politics, but too many people think liberalism is about sex, religion and marriage. It isn’t.

And while Labour bangs on sarcastically about ‘money no problem’, this is exactly how it thinks and talks. The Labour Party has always spoken as though there is a secret money-tap somewhere in the Prime Minister’s office, and that if only it could gain control of that tap, it would change the country by splashing money about.

It has never made the link, in anything it says and does, between private initiative and money in the state coffers.

Nor has Labour ever made the link between private initiative and employment. Only last Sunday the Opposition Leader told us that Labour will solve the pension problem by persuading more people, like middle-aged women, to work.

A Nationalist Party leader would have said ‘by creating jobs’ or ‘by engendering the right environment for job creation’. But Labour has always thought that you can whistle up jobs like you can whistle up money, so it’s just a matter of persuading more people to work.

When they finally decide that working might be a good idea, they’ll find the jobs ready there waiting for them.

The last Labour Prime Minister bar Sant put 8,000 people on the public sector payroll in the months leading up to the 1987 general election. Mintoff and his Golden Years adviser, the brilliant Karmenu Vella who – like one of those horror-film ghouls who springs up from the marsh eternally when you thought he was dead and over – will be writing the programme for our lives between 2013 and 2018 (a full 40 years after he was first a minister in Mintoff’s government), created schemes like the ‘Pijunieri’ and ‘Iżra u Rabbi’ to falsely mop up soaring unemployment.

And of course, Joseph Muscat – possibly because he tends to be a little slow on the uptake unless thoroughly rehearsed beforehand – failed to make the connection between his factually correct statement that most women don’t work and his pet political accusation that most families can’t cope with the cost of living.

He’s either being disingenuous or it really hasn’t occurred to him that the one is the result of the other. Or maybe it’s just that he truly believes Malta should be the only place in the known world where one wage can keep two adults and three children, pay for the mortgage, furnish the home, pay the household overheads, clothe all five and pay for outings and trips abroad. Oh, and also contribute the taxes and national insurance to keep those two adults in pensions and all five in hospital treatment and training or education whether they work or not.

The Opposition Leader is correct in that more women need to be encouraged into the workforce (make sure of the jobs first), but he doesn’t need to wait until he becomes Boss Man to do that. He can start right now, by using the excellent means at his disposal: Super One radio, Super One television, Maltastar, Kullħadd, and the public platform given to him by the independent media which faithfully report his words without putting them into context. ‘Joseph Muscat said this’, ‘Joseph Muscat said that’.

“Women of Malta,” he could say into his Sunday Super One mike, “the only way to cope with the cost of living and to maintain your independence and self-respect is to work. If you don’t want to work, then don’t marry somebody who takes home €1,000 a month. If you don’t want to work but still want to marry somebody who takes home €1,000 a month, don’t have children. But you can’t marry somebody who takes home €1,000 a month, refuse to work, have several children, and then complain about the cost of living and expect politicians to come up with a solution, because the solution lies with you.”

But he’s not going to say that, is he, because that’s the liberal approach and Labour is a national socialist party. Joseph Muscat will carry right on with his inherent contradictions, attacking the government because families are struggling to survive while failing to mention that they’re struggling to survive mainly because five or six people are living off a single wage, and that wouldn’t be ‘living’ in the way their parents, who slept on bales of straw in stables and ate only bread and onions, lived, either.

Meanwhile, he promises to ‘persuade’ women to work once he becomes prime minister. You know, because if he tries to persuade them now, they might ignore him.

They’re likely to ignore him in any case. Muscat knows that what his supporters want is not advice ‘biex nibgħat il-mara taħdem’ but an announcement in the first Labour budget of a mandatory wage increase of 50% coupled with free water and electricity to go with the free schooling, free training, free university education and free healthcare – all while complaining about public debt, of course. Perhaps we could also have free food while we’re at it: seize the importers’ businesses (now that we can no longer burn the flour mills) and have them run by the Labour Party at a loss, selling food at below cost price, or even better, giving it away to deserving housewives who are performing their moral duty of looking after children aged 19 and 20.

And as though to drive the point home that this is exactly how Labour and its supporters tend to think, out popped Marie-Louise Coleiro, now fully recovered from her debilitating conviction that perhaps she had better resign from the Labour Party. The Labour Party, she said, is pushing the government to lay on chemotherapy at the Gozo hospital, so that patients don’t have to make the terrible and arduous journey, across hill and dale and canyon and river, to the main general hospital several hundred miles away.

Well, that’s not actually what she said, but it’s exactly what it sounded like. A lifetime living in Malta tends not just to shrink the mind, I find, but also to completely warp our sense of space, proportion and distance. Maybe our Marie-Louise thinks that ‘abroad’ chemotherapy services are laid on 20 minutes by car from every rural town and village.

The healthcare authorities have said that they looked into the feasibility of doing this, and found that it wasn’t feasible at all. It wasn’t an administrative decision, they said, but a ‘medical’ one, the advice having come from the professionals themselves. But let’s not kid ourselves, there are financial and administrative concerns, too.

Only the Labour Party would need to have this explained, or whine relentlessly on about public debt while demanding the full replication of chemotherapy services a few miles away from the existing ones so that patients don’t have to make the commute. Many Maltese cancer patients have to make the far more trying and costly commute to London, so why doesn’t Mrs Coleiro Preca go the whole hog and demand the replication of the Royal Marsden at Mater Dei so that none of us will ever have to endure that?

Mrs Coleiro Preca piggy-backed on the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses, whose members are apparently feeling most resentful at the incursion of unwanted Libyan patients (more about this at a later date) and which has just released the most unpleasant statement that the government seems more concerned with Libyans than it does with cancer patients who live in Gozo.

The Libyan patients have made the arduous commute from their homes in Libya, but they don’t count because they are not Maltese. They are only human beings. Patients from Gozo, on the other hand, need to have their very different spatial sense pandered to. Just listen to Marie-Louise, who has done an excellent job of making all people who live in Gozo sound as spoiled, selfish and detached from the real world as eye surgeon Franco Mercieca.

“Because of the effects of chemotherapy, they are kept in hospital for a day and sometimes more, even up to two weeks,” she said. “But if the service were provided in Gozo, they would be able to recover at home.”

Get this: the problem is not that patients from Gozo are being made to commute between Malta and Gozo every day, or that they are being seen as outpatients, given the treatment and then turned out into the street while feeling ill. The problem is that they are given a bed but they want their own bed at home. But there’s more. “Gozitan families also have to pay to sleep in Malta, or to travel back and forth to be close to their relatives.”

And the brilliant Labour solution to Gozitan families who don’t want to pay for the ferry trip or for a night in a cheap hotel? Why, that’s to make the entire country – including those very families who are resentful about paying the ferry fare - pay millions of euros for the duplication of chemotherapy services in Gozo.

Because all you have to do is turn on that fabled money-tap behind Lawrence Gonzi’s chair in Castille. Talk about irrational.