As I listened to the Parliamentary debate on Wednesday, I shrank with shame.

This was our House of Representatives.

It has been reduced to rushing votes even when they had long been planned. It was only some hours before that the Attorney General had noticed that the Bill to implement the measures announced by the Budget Speech had become a money bill due to some amendments that had been tacked on.

So the Bill had to be debated in the plenary session and voted at committee stage, clause after clause.

Minister Tonio Fenech said there was nothing unusual in this, and that usually there is only Charles Mangion from the Opposition and himself present to battle it out, clause after clause.

Maybe my memory ain’t what it used to be, but I seem to remember such committee stages being held in the plenary.

What seems strange and unworthy of our House of Representatives is this bunching of votes, due to the government decision earlier on in this legislature that votes have to be announced and set from days before so that all MPs can make sure they will be in Malta.

Though I do not dispute the legitimacy of this decision, I think it detracts from what a parliament is all about. Parliament is not and can never be turned into a pre-planned exercise where nothing is unpredictable.

The fact is that this is a government majority of one and that, by any definition, is slightly unpredictable. To turn it then into something absolutely predictable where votes can only be taken on predetermined days and times, like the bells on the clock tower, might make for more government security but it’s mostly a sham – papering over the cracks and acting as if nothing is the matter.

And that’s precisely what this government is doing: it is acting as though nothing is the matter, as if the government majority is rock-solid. Which it isn’t.

It is this, then, that spawns people like Franco Debono and gets them to act the way he did.

I did not like his haranguing in Parliament on Wednesday – “Where is the Prime Minister?” I, for one, can say where Dr Debono was for some two hours before Parliament met; he was outside his most frequented restaurant, surrounded by a group of young people with drinks in their hands in varying poses of adulation.

With many others, I read his haranguing right: he was hyping up the attack on the Prime Minister and the government prior to vote, whereas I believe he had spoken of voting against the Bill in the recent past.

What changed matters was the switch, which put the parliamentary debate on the Justice Minister to later this month, so Dr Debono had no option but to help the government survive Wednesday’s vote so he can do his thing on the CMB debate.

And so it goes on, this tiring waltz between a man on death watch and a prime minister equally on death watch, a battle of wits, strategies, schemes which is what politics in Malta has become.

I have long been saying: it is useless to have a brand new, if controversial, parliament building if it is still to be managed on old, primitive lines.

There was no need for the House to be in such a rushed manner that amendments to the bill could not be presented in proper time and due notice given to one and all instead of a piece of paper hurriedly slipped to the Opposition a day or two before.

But that, of course, gave Dr Debono an opening for another tirade and the media lapped that up, rather than Minister Fenech’s analysis of the Commission forecast on the Maltese economy. We live by sound bites and tirades rather than by clear arguments.

The real loser is the country, which gets the sound bites but loses the thread.

The Opposition has meanwhile slipped its bearing and changed tack. It is now focusing on what it will offer the young.

Now this may be another phase in building the party’s electoral plank but it was a risky choice: education is the PN’s home ground with the main breakthroughs being free access to university, a revamped and much enlarged MCAST, the stipends and grants for post-grad courses, along with new schools all over the islands and computers from an early age.

There are, of course, some things that can be bettered: in particular the literacy level and the percentage of children who do not continue with tertiary education. There are, of course, areas in Malta where educational attainment is much less than in other areas. There are inner city situations not much better than those in New York or London.

But I doubt if Labour, for all its sheen, will grasp the bull by the horns, something not even this government has done, and tackle the heavy unionisation of teaching grades which, in my opinion, severely shackles the freedom of schools to come up with a different programme.

There are the church schools and the private schools, which in no mean manner plug the gap (and Labour’s record in this direction need not be remembered). Nor do I think that Labour intends to liberalise the education system so that anybody can come up with a school proposal and State schools can shake free from the department’s stranglehold.

At least, however, or so far, Labour has avoided the trend that is swiftly sweeping across Europe – to turn eurosceptic, to declaim like François Hollande that the days of austerity are over and that austerity has only led to pain and wasted lives.

As has been pointed out, all governments that tried to win elections in these times of crises have been defeated, the latest being Nicolas Sarkozy. The Dutch government has fallen and Fianna Fail is campaigning hard for a No vote on 31 May in the Irish referendum.

Being anti-EU is paying dividends. Look at Greece – three attempts at forming a new government, from Right, Left and Centre, and none has succeeded. Greece’s exit from the euro is now just a matter of when, not if.

Malta must be one of the most dovish and meek about this issue, which is very strange given the Labour Party’s historic opposition to EU membership. So far, it has not gone there.

Of course, we have not seen the end of the crisis. As we watch the collapse of Greek society when the drachma is reintroduced, and as we watch what will happen to France if Hollande implements his electoral commitments, we may still see whether for all our Punch & Judy politics we are wiser than we appear or not.

[email protected]