Parliament is the highest institution of the land. It deserves the utmost respect, no matter what majority a government has and it also deserves the respect of the Opposition – after all, our MPs are our representatives, people put into the seats of power by the voter.

In his budget speech, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna announced that parliament’s honoraria will be paid pro-rata, according to the attendance of MPs. But at the same time yesterday, it emerged that only nine MPs were present for the hot potato that is the Citizenship Act. Given the whole hoo-ha that has been raised by the proposal to sell Maltese passports to wealthy third country nationals, one would expect a full house (no pun intended). When one also considers that the opposition made such a fuss about it (rightly so), then one has to wonder whether the interest is real, or whether it is all just for political mileage.

Yesterday was a Monday, and on that day, Cabinet meets. It emerged that during yesterday’s morning debate, it was only Home Affairs Minister Manwel Mallia who was present on the government bench. Without going into too much detail, Ministers are not excusably absent when they are away on business or attending to ministerial duties. That can only happen if an MP is on parliamentary duty. The situation is to be remedied and rightly so. In our opinion, cabinet meetings are a justified reason to be absent.

But it begs the question, where were the government back benchers? Should they not have been present for such a debate? In the event, PN whip David Agius called for a quorum – which necessitates 15 MPs in total from both sides of the House to be present.  Phone calls were made and the cabinet meeting attendees came to Parliament. The debate resumed, but then the government MPs left once more to continue their meeting. Again quorum was called and back they came.

One also wonders why only eight MPs from the opposition were there for the debate. Given that so much opposition has been put forward against the scheme by the Nationalist Party, one would expect that most of them would be present.

The issue boils down to two things. Firstly, MPs are part timers (not ministers) and they therefore still practice their professions (especially in the mornings as many are lawyers). The second is that they are not as interested as they make out to be. If they were, they would be there, period.

While we understand that there are anomalies in the system (the cabinet meeting for example), we cannot understand why the parties did not instruct their backbenchers to be present. We also cannot understand why a session was moved in the morning when both parties knew that the majority of their MPs would not be attending. Is this serious discussion, or is it a waste of taxpayers’ money?  While we welcome the idea of pro-rata payments, we question how that is going to help attendance rates. On this issue which is so important, the country and its people deserve a thorough discussion, not a ping pong game over the two sides of parliament between a handful of MPs. It is actually quite shameful.