With the sad honoraria having raised its ugly head once again this week, there are a number of points that need to be raised again about the contentious ‘raise’ that the former Nationalist administration had approved for the Cabinet at the beginning of the 2008-2013 legislature.

And first and foremost among those points is that each and every member of the Labour administration’s Cabinet should be receiving that very same honoraria as we speak.

The current state of affairs in which members of Cabinet, ministers and junior ministers, are not paid for their work as Members of Parliament is far more outrageous than the outrage that the Labour Party and its exponents had feigned when the issue had been brought to the fore.

The institution of the honoraria for Cabinet members back in 2008 after the Nationalist Party was narrowly re-elected was not a travesty; it was a case of an injustice having been corrected. What is a travesty is that the practice was brought to a halt and that as such, this current Cabinet is not receiving the full wage it is perfectly entitled to.

As most of the public is now aware, following the raging debate over the Ministerial Code of Ethics, a member of Cabinet is duty-bound to give up his/her day jobs so as to focus entirely on running the slice of the country that has been placed under their remit. 

That is all well and good, although there is also a very good argument that those who have taken both a Hippocratic oath as well as a ministerial oath should be given a certain amount of leeway or a transitional phase to see the patients under their care referred to other doctors or to have their treatments completed.

What we have here is a situation in which a Cabinet member is a full time state employee and also serves as a Member of Parliament. We have several other situations in which parliamentarians are also full-time employees of the state in other sectors and who also receive the honoraria due to them as Members of Parliament.

The argument that ministers deserve the same treatment as other MPs who, similarly, have government jobs certainly holds water. Why shouldn’t a government employee, in this case a minister or parliamentary secretary, have the same remuneration conditions as an MP in that they receive a parliamentary salary as well as their full time public sector wage?

It is truly unfathomable how such a distinction is made between a Cabinet member and other state employees who are also MPs. Cabinet members are, after all, those who are entrusted to run our country and if these are not to be well, or at least fairly, remunerated individuals, then, it must be asked, who is? 

Moreover, ministers, generally speaking, are highly qualified people who could, generally speaking, earn far more in the private sector, and if any government is to attract the best people to serve in Cabinet, it must make those positions as close to being worth their while as possible, from a monetary aspect.

The timing of the increases in both MPs’ as well as Cabinet’s salaries back then was poor. The decision had been taken just after the 2008 general election, when the Nationalist Party had made the then impending recession a central electoral argument – in that the government’s ‘proven sound fiscal policy’ was the only way forward in the troubled times ahead that were being forecast.

With hindsight it would have been far more advisable to have approved the raises, waited out the recession and, once it passed, and then and only then, implement them – and implement both MPs’ and Cabinet’s salary increases in tandem.

Then again, hindsight is always 20/20. Even had it been done that way, it could still very well have caused ripples, but the issue certainly would not have become the tidal wave that it grew into. 

This newspaper had exposed how key members of the Opposition had known full well that the raises in the salaries of ministers and parliamentary secretaries had been granted at least two years prior to the outbursts of condemnation. That revealed the uglier side of politics, namely political opportunism – at its worst.

And now that some of those same people who had cried bloody murder over what was a righteous yet poorly-handled issue of seeing Cabinet members being properly paid for their services to the country are literally paying the price

Yes, despite its size, each and every member of Joseph Muscat’s Cabinet should also be receiving the honoraria they are due.